The Cordial home project: sean codeiro and claire healy
The 'great Australian dream' of owning a family home on a standard suburban quarter-acre block is a well worn cliche, but it remains a powerful one within the traditional Australian psyche. It conjures a blissful existence of family life, replete with imagery of backyard barbeques, and maybe, if one has the means, a swimming pool for the kids to splash about in after school and on the weekends, under the clear blue Australian summer skies. These days, in Sydney in particular, spiraling real-estate prices mean that this 'dream' has moved increasingly beyond the reach of many, particularly for those who choose to work outside of the steady-income professions that might provide access to home loans, the latest family car, and the domestic appliances and home entertainment centres that advertisers tell us are necessary elements of the 'ideal' lifestyle.
The irony of this as a fantasy is not lost on artists Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy, who, in their collaborative installation work The Cordial Home Project, acquired a weatherboard house by alternative means, not to live in, but to demolish and reconstruct as a condensed and neatly presented 'essence' of a home and all it stands for. In their exhibition notes the artists stated that 'Through the physical transformation of the unwanted house into elemental packaged scrap and the re-commodification of junk into artwork we also wish to highlight the absurd delusion of two young artists owning a home in Sydney'.
In the Artspace gallery, the work crouched centrally within the exhibition space, almost bordered by the existing four thick wooden columns. A seemingly solid block, the object rose as layers: bricks, sections of sawn timber studded with pieces of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline