… we were thinking about gentrification, displacement, consumer culture, excess … from the position of artists living a precarious life … how objects and belongings can own you.ⁱ

For almost two decades the artistic duo Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro have made work that is conceptually layered and physically imposing. While they create objects and installations referencing the histories of art and popular culture, much of their work exposes the hypocrisies of mode­rn life and is fabricated from items we desire, consume and discard. With heightened awareness of the privilege and challenges offered by travel—as experienced through the couple’s many international artist residencies—Healy and Cordeiro address the place of the artist within a global capitalist culture.

Deceased Estate 2004 was built by Healy and Cordeiro at the Glashaus, a former textile warehouse located in Weil am Rhein, a German town bordering France and Switzerland. The duo lived there with some Swiss artists who had shifted across the border in pursuit of more affordable rent—only to be evicted— as the warehouse was being redeveloped into ‘New York Style Loft Apartments’. This experience of displacement was familiar to Healy and Corderio, who along with a cohort of artists in the late 1990s and early 2000s had made their homes and studios in the Imperial Slacks warehouse in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. As gentrification swept through the neighbourhood, the artists were evicted, unable to afford dwellings that had previously been undesirable.

At the Glashaus, the Australians found:

four floors filled with the detritus of disgruntled artists … Furniture that was too big for their new residence, old artworks that didn’t work out, beer bottles, boxes of unused paints, reams of virgin drawing paper, magazines, lots of wood. Sometimes we would take a bit of wood out to burn on the barbecue or take an extra chair to sit on. Sometimes we’d add a bottle or two.ⁱⁱ

Having arrived at the Glashaus with little more than two backpacks of possessions (the rest of their worldly goods were shifted into Mr and Mrs Cordeiro’s Sydney garage only to appear in a later work Self Storage 2006), Healy and Cordeiro set about turning this collection of junk into a site-specific installation. From floor to ceiling they carefully constructed an enormous ball of objects, tightly bound by orange rope, a monument to the instability and uncertainty of life as an artist.

Deliberately unwieldly, once installed Deceased Estate would be impossible to move as one piece, nor would it fit though any entry or exit of the Glaushaus. It was to become someone else’s problem, or even a remarkable gift for the developers. Years later, when Healy and Cordeiro returned, the work was gone, the site had been transformed, and, like many of their projects, all that was left to remember Deceased Estate was a photograph—a relic to say ‘we were here’.

Beatrice Gralton

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro Deceased Estate (installation) 2004, entire found detritus from artists’ warehouse, Glashaus Gallery, Weil am Rhein, Germany, Lambda print, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle, purchased 2006 

ISBN: 9780642334879