It is a little-known fact that mould does not grow on Lego blocks. In the ordinary circumstances of play, it is a quality that goes unnoticed, but when you are building large-scale works of art using Lego blocks in the heat and humidity of Malaysia it is a blessing, says artist Claire Healy, whose latest exhibition, with her partner and collaborator Sean Cordeiro, melds life-size Lego models of animals with items of IKEA furniture in a show titled Venereal Architecture.
The works were created in a residence at Rimbun Dahan, a privately owned botanical garden and artists’ colony on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, founded by arts philanthropists Angela Hijjas and her architect husband Hijjas Kasturi in 1994.
Internationally acclaimed Sydney artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro – have new works made out of Lego showing at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
“The animals appear somewhat penetrated by the furniture,” Healy says. “Like an entomologist pins beetles to a board, we have used furniture to pin down these wild animals. It’s an investigation into the way nature infiltrates our very being, and how we are forever manipulating our environment; so much so, that we have lost sight of its origins.”
The original impetus behind the project was to make something from domestic materials and create “a sense of the uncanny”, Cordeiro says. “The intermeshing of these two forms creates a sense of unease. We wanted to use this feeling to think about how we share space with nature.”
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Eight arms and four legs: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s Lego octopus on an IKEA chair.
Healy and Cordeiro’s work, often playful in tone and created with found and ready-made materials, has been exhibited throughout Australia and internationally. In one of their best-known works, Par Avion (2011), Healy and Cordeiro cut a Cessna 172 aircraft into 70 pieces, applied postage stamps to each one, and posted them via airmail to the exhibition’s destination, San Francisco. In Future Remnant (2011), a dinosaur’s skeleton was propped up by an artful assemblage of IKEA cabinets and shelving units.
Bringing together the iconic Scandinavian brands Lego and IKEA is “just an off-hand comment”, Cordeiro says, “but the two objects [Lego and furniture] are interesting in that they are both consumer items that must be assembled after purchasing. One embodies the dreams of a child, the other the aspirations of an adult.”
In the course of their year-long residency at Rimbun Dahan, sore thumbs and fingers became an issue, Cordeiro says. “An interesting thing about Lego is that it is extremely sharp for a piece of plastic. Once a sculpture has weight to it, it’s like trying to move around a bed of nails.”
The show’s title, Venereal Architecture, is a reference to early “spirit photography”, Cordeiro says. Both artists say they were intrigued by attempts to capture images of ghosts and spirits in Victorian times. “We liked the concept of ectoplasm: something that just manifested into a space and the mottled colouring of the Lego animals references that kind of apparition.
“We have used furniture to pin down these wild animals,” Claire Healy says.
“In particular we were interested in the work of a medium called Eva C. Her medium work was quite voyeuristic, with ectoplasm emerging from parts of her body that you’d rather keep spirits out of.”
Venereal Architecture opens at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Paddington on August 1.