CLAIRE HEALY: Our first collaborative project took place in 2001 with ‘Location to Die For’. We actually had no intention of collaborating at the time. We were both Masters students at what was then the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts (CoFA), and had put our names down for the student gallery Kudos. When we went to check out the space, we began thinking about using it in its entirety. As the exterior of the building was ‘to die for’, in real estate speak—and the interior was spacious with polished floorboards—the space was begging to be converted from a gallery into New York style loft apartments.
At the time, Sean was living at the Imperial Slacks warehouse in Surry Hills and I was living up the road in a three storey terrace. Both of us were being driven mad by the perpetual state of renovation that both spaces were undergoing. The whole pre and post-Olympic period had turned Sydney into a frenzy of makeovers. The noise of this ongoing state of flux was like living in a warzone. Thus came about our idea for Kudos. We placed a real estate placard out the front of the gallery, which featured
the usual wide angled interior shots of the space with real estate jargon describing it, as well as a contact number to arrange a viewing and even an open day (the actual exhibition opening). The installation consisted of a floor plan of a house made from sandbags that resembled bunker walls, and a gas lamp in the centre of each room. The space was bombarded with smoke machines and every sound bite of war-like noise we could find.
SEAN CORDEIRO: Yeah, it was a pretty punk move. We changed the answering machine in the gallery, asking people to leave a message while sounds in the background made out that a military apocalypse was in action. People actually left messages of interest in the property on the answering machine and someone stole the real estate sign we put out the front; I like to think that it was a competing real estate agency. In the end, I believe we were able to double our audience numbers thanks to the real estate investors visiting our show.
CH: Our earlier work like this was more locally political, as we were reflecting on our situation as poor artists living in a city that was ‘on itself ’ and way too expensive. After this our practice went beyond Sydney and we became art nomads living on every bit of grant money we could get our hands on by way of residency, scholarship, stipend, etc. We quickly realised a focus on our own identity in Sydney didn’t make sense abroad. Our first works overseas dealt with shared global experiences like consumption and ownership.
Deceased Estate (2004) saw the contents of an artist run studio space in southern Germany bound into an enormous ball held together by orange rope. This was the discarded stuff of disgruntled Swiss artists who had been kicked out of their space to make way for New York style loft apartments—the usual gentrification story. Their anger was marked by their refusal to remove their belongings out of the space, so we came along and neatly tied it all up, which in fact would have made it far more difficult to remove. Upon finishing our huge dung beetle ball of detritus, we threw a great old school rollschuh party, where punters skated around this strange monument to their past. Such fun!
SC: We were lucky enough to reside at the Australia Council Studio in Tokyo the year after that. Unfortunately, we got a huge tax bill after not doing our tax and not collecting receipts for the previous five years so we were each living on about ¥1,500 yen ($15–20) a day during our time in Takadanobaba.
I was living on butter, instant ramen, fake beer and other carbohydrates I bought at the ¥100 store. I got fat.
The feeling of rabid consumerism that still exists in post-bubble Tokyo was made more acute by our relative poverty. Fortunately, an old university friend of mine got me some work building the interior design for a pachinko
parlour in Yokohama. With the money I earned, I joined in the consumerist throng and purchased a second hand medium format Mamiya RB67 camera. We decided to use it to document all the crap that was left inside the studio residence. All that stuff stayed in position for a week while we waited for the film to process. How I prayed for an earthquake not to come while all that stuff was stacked above my head in the bedroom…
CH: It was an exciting work, our first medium format image that we shot ourselves.
Our latest work also relies upon documentation to exist beyond the original object. The Drag (2015) is a two screen video work that documents the disassembly and reassembly of an old Rover P6.
It’s our first collaborative video work. As each piece of car is removed, it is carried from one screen and taken to the other screen, where it is slowly put back together. It is an imagined post-fossil fuel car race.
SC: We’ve been asked if we fight, working so closely together and living together. We don’t fight as such, although we are not often fond of each other’s initial concepts for works.
CH: But we write it all down and with a bit of time and perhaps the right space to come along, the idea will re-surface. Being parents in a nuclear family obviously impacts on how we live and work together but that’s OK. We’re too old now for Berlin-sized hangovers anyway.