Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro have been working together since 2001. Combining a playful sense of humour and an engagement with art historical precedents, their work is characterised by the deconstruction and reinvention of found objects and everyday items – such as VHS tapes, bricks of Lego, IKEA furniture and household items – into large-scale installations, sculptures and site-specific works of art. Together the artists have spent a great deal of time travelling, often responding to ideas associated with travel, movement, consumerism and the domestic space.

Healy and Cordeiro’s practice reflects a preoccupation with the dynamics of global mobility-the networks, standards and financial systems that enable and restrict the movement of people and goods in the modern era. Creating tensions between order and disorder, their works are shaped by traditional sculptural concerns such as mass, form and scale, however they also incorporate the expressive potential of motion, speaking to the way things move and change over time.

Currently Healy and Cordeiro are artists in residence at Tenjinyama Artist Studios, Sapporo, Japan, an Asialink Creative Exchange supported by Create NSW, hosting The Pizza Effect クレア＆ショーン滞在成果展示 until 29 September 2018. Their public art commission, Cloud Nation, at Green Square Library Tower, City of Sydney opens in October 2018. Cloud Nation is a repurposed vintage Beechcraft Travel Air plane suspended inside the library with its surface transformed into a meticulously crafted miniature world.

Recent exhibitions include The Ugly Stick Orchestra, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (2017); Harbouring, Te Whare Hēra, Wellington (2016); Effing the Ineffable, Chan Hampe Galleries, Singapore (2016); We Hunt Mammoth,Yorii-za, Kamiyama, Japan (2015); Architects of Destruction, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco (2014); Venereal Architecture, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (2014); Habitat, Rimbun Dahan, Kuala Lumpur (2014); Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2013); Tapestries of Disaster, Art Stage, Singapore (2013); and Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2012).

Healy and Cordeiro completed a Masters of Fine Art at UNSW Art & Design in 2004.

In this video Healy and Cordeiro chat to NAVA about working together, their collaborative practice, getting started and the continuous process of discovery and learning new crafts.

Production: Dominic Kirkwood

Photo: Silversalt

Parts of the above text have been adapted from Anna Davis, ‘Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro’ in Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, exh.cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012.