Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy
Keith Gallasch
Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy, The Cordial Home Project
While business pundits prophesied the end of the current housing boom, the judges for the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship 2003 (Aug 14) awarded the $40,000 prize to Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy for The Cordial Home Project, which originally appeared at Sydney’s Artspace (Feb 6-28). The judges commented on the work as “topical and extremely relevant to the current concerns about the affordability of housing in Australia” and described it as “a demanding and ambitious project that is provocative and conceptually informed.” In their note accompanying the work, Cordeiro and Healy wrote, “The exhibition documents the transformation of a house from family home to unwanted scrap to art object. In deconstructing meanings of the home, there is a misguided yearning to discover its real essence as suggested once in its title…[W]e also wish to highlight the absurd delusion of 2 young artists owning a home in Sydney.” There is something at once sobering and exhilarating about the project in the rawness and neatness of the layered components of the original house in its new form (not a little reminiscent of compacted automobiles), a carefully stacked and packed block from which all inhabitable space and the spirit of domesticity seem to have been sucked away. This is compression, artistic and actual, at its most powerful. It was reported that the scholarship will take Cordeiro and Healy to India to work on the collaborative building of a “500 foot materialisation of the Maitreya Buddha, out of a sand cast bronze aluminium alloy.”
RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 8
