Excess Baggage
For more than a decade, collaborating Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro have led a nomadic life, carving out bases in Sydney and Berlin, whilst criss-crossing the globe with residencies and a string of shows throughout Europe, Asia and the U.S.
Travelling light, their art practise embodies the idea of home and how quickly we accumulate goods and chattels, when settled in one place. With their first solo museum exhibition in Australia at Sydney’s MCA, the pair will showcase their collaborative sculptures and installations, which are nearly all created out of the detritus of modern life.
These dense, monumental constructions are testament to their elaborate process of collecting, packing, sorting and reassembling people’s everyday possessions, from housing materials to home appliances, and transforming them into extraordinary works of art. Diverse arrays of discarded objects, like the chaotic clutter of a garage sale, are rearranged into ordered, minimalist structures. Only on close inspection can the viewer become aware of the personal history and wear and tear of the individual items contained within these assemblages.
This survey show highlights some of Healy and Cordeiro’s major works since they began their collaboration in 2001, when both were completing Masters of Fine Arts degrees at the University of NSW.
In one of their early works, ‘The Cordial Home Project’ from 2003, they disassembled an entire wooden house in suburban Sydney that had been condemned and stacked all the materials between four beams within an exhibition space. With another installation, ‘Deceased Estate’ (2004), the couple packaged up the contents of an abandoned artist’s studio warehouse in Germany, bundled and tied it up into an enormous bulbous ball of refuse.
The astonishing ‘flatpak’ (2006), also created in Berlin, involved the duo acquiring a 1960s and proceeding to saw it up into small pieces. The caravan was reduced to meticulous piles of plastic and wood veneer.
So what is the point of all this domestic carnage? In a world of over-consumption and increasingly transient lifestyles, the artists seem to be commenting on the copious waste we humans leave behind when moving on to a new locale or domicile. They are also exploring the emotional attachment we have to personal objects, possessions and the home, versus the actual monetary value of the physical materials. The artists themselves acquire as little as possible, only using unwanted, used materials or objects for their art practise.
More recently, Healy and Cordeiro have incorporated the concept of the passage of time in their work, such as ‘Life Span’ (2009), acquired this year by the MCA for their permanent collection. Exhibited as part of their work for the Australian Pavillion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, the mammoth five metre high structure acts like a contemporary ‘Memento Mori’. Over 170,000 used video cassette tapes have been collected and stacked into a solid towering rectangular block. The combined running time of these cassettes add up to 60.1 years, which was the average life expectancy back in 1974 when the tapes were invented.
Other large-scale sculptures have incorporated reconstructed pre-fab materials, such as Lego blocks, Ikea bookshelves, packaged foodstuffs and even very recently and most ambitiously in ‘Par Avian’ (2011) an entire light aircraft, salvaged by the two artists from a scrap dealer, with each fragmented sent through the post and then reassembled on a gallery floor.
Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s art installations seem to be growing more complex and ambitious in size and scale with each new project they embark upon. Having set forth on their peripatetic lifestyle back in 2003, after receiving the Helen Lempriere Travelling Arts Scholarship, their work has taken them from Tokyo to Taipei, Basel to Berlin and Nepal to North America (with exhibitions this year in Washington and San Francisco). As the year draws to an end, the MCA in Sydney is a fitting dwelling for the artists to showcase their decade long practise, almost as a form of a homecoming. Just don’t expect them to stay too long.
