Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro
bio:
‘Healy and Cordeiro are artists who reclaim and transform the fallout of consumer society in their practice. Combining a playful sense of humour and an engagement with art historical precedents, their work is characterised by the deconstruction and reinvention of prefabricated structures and the assemblage of accumulated objects into extraordinary sculptures and installations.’-Anna Davis, Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, MCA, Sydney, 2012. They have exhibited in Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania. They represented Australia at the 53rd Venice Biennale; the 5th Auckland Triennale and the first Setouchi Art Triennale. In 2018 they participated in the Australian Biennale Adelaide. Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro are represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia.
"" 2019
statement:
This work is inspired by a vision that can sometimes be seen, driving along a lonely highway. A stranded car, a missing wheel and a large rock used as a jack to prop up the car while the wheel is being removed. A strange vision, seemingly linking the stone age to the industrial age. Instead of a rock, we will use a concrete sculpture, nothing fancy, something that can be purchased at ALDI or a garage sale. The sculpture will be more along the lines of something found in a garden rather than a under a pyramid.The car will have the appearance of having been hastily abandoned, like something from The Cars that Ate Paris or the original Mad Max: a sign of the end of times. From the car emanates the sounds of a century ago: Dame Nellie Melba, an International opera singer that took Melbourne as her stage name.The work will bring into focus the difficulty Australia has with the idea of ‘Culture’. High culture is hard work, it is practicing your scales on the piano, it’s reading books, it’s memorising dance moves. It is the kind of solitary work that Australia does not celebrate. How do we produce culture that is authentic to the Australian experience? We believe these tensions are especially obvious when talking about culture in Regional Australia. How do we create work that is not the emulation of another culture nor is it ‘The Loaded Dog’.Australia is dry. It’s wit is dry. The culture is even dryer.
