Design and Art Australia Online

Born in Sydney in 1974, Sean Cordeiro is a sculptor and installation artist whose cultural heritage includes Chinese, Portugese, Christmas Islander, Irish, German and Indian. He lives in Sydney and Berlin, and has also lived in Japan for a short time, having been awarded an Australia Council Residency in Tokyo in 2005. Cordeiro works primarily in collaboration with his partner, Claire Healy. Much of his, and their, work is site-specific. Cordiero and Healy, along with Shaun Gladwell and Vernon Ah Kee, represented Australia in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

Cordeiro’s art studies began at the College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales (UNSW), where he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 1997. He majored in sculpture, performance and installation studies and it was at UNSW that he met and began to work with Healy. Throughout his artistic career Cordeiro has worked almost exclusively in collaboration with Healy. Keen to further studies with Bonita Ely, Martin Sims, Adrian Hall and Michael Goldberg, he returned to COFA to complete a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2004.

While Cordeiro was still an undergraduate student his artwork was shown in group exhibitions including 'Sculpture by the Sea’, Sydney (1997). His work was selected for the 'Young Guts’ exhibition at Lewers Gallery, Emu Plains (1993) and the 'Helen Lemprière Travelling Arts Scholarship’ exhibition at Artspace, Sydney (2007). His first joint exhibition with Healy outside of COFA, was at Artspace in 2003; here they exhibited The Cordial Home Project (2003), a work that involved demolishing a wooden house and re-erecting the materials in a compacted rectangular block inside the gallery space. From 1998 to 2004 Cordeiro and Healy were involved in the Imperial Slacks Collective of artists, sharing gallery, performance and studio spaces. The fifteen-strong collective collaborated on various art projects including Eighteen is Enough (2000) and Slacking Off (2002). Other artists involved in Imperial Slacks included Lea Donnan, Alex Davies and Chris Fox.

As a sculptor and installation artist, Cordeiro recycles found materials and discarded objects, selecting whatever seems appropriate to express central themes of consumption and migration. For example, Past Times (2007), a collaborative work with Healy, is an installation made from the parts of a carefully dismembered caravan, neatly arranged on the floor of The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. The use of an old caravan is important to the work because, in its traditional context, the caravan is a compartmentalised space meant to be a home away from home, but when deconstructed, the pieces of wood, doors and windows become devoid of space considerations and their former functionality. Earlier works by Cordeiro that use found materials include $hop and $ave (2001), Don’t Leave (2003), and the Cordeiro/Healy two-person exhibition 'Custom Living’ (2006) shown at Gallery Barry Keldoulis in Waterloo, Sydney.

An unusual and disquieting juxtaposition of found materials was the household paraphernalia appended to an army tank in Package Tour for the 2003 Sculpture by the Sea (Sydney). The work prompted one art writer to observe that, “if nomadism is the fate of the outcast and the evicted, then there is no pity or homesickness in Cordeiro and Healy’s image of it” (Colless 2006).

Although Cordeiro is known for his collaboration with Healy, he has also produced solo paintings (Double Negative, 2000 and Delusions of Reference, 2001), sculpture (I Fight Evil with Evil, 2000), public art (Welcome to the Lucky Country, 2002, and Project X, 2003), and installations (Kami, 1997, and Don’t Leave, 2003).

Cordeiro supports his art projects financially through art sales and occasional teaching work at COFA. He has received numerous awards and grants including an Australian Post Graduate Award (2000), the Australia Council New Artist Grant (2002), the Freedman Foundation Travelling Art Award (2004), a Australia Council Tokyo Residency (2005), and a NAVA Marketing Grant (2005). As a partnership, Cordeiro and Healy have won a number of awards and grants including an Australia Council artist run initiative grant (2002), the Helen Lemprière Travelling Arts Scholarship (2003), the Art Gallery of New South Wales Dyason Bequest, the Australia Council New Work Grant (2004 and 2008) and the Australia Council Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Residency, Berlin (2005).

The work of Cordeiro and Healy is in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, Newcastle; The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney; Artbank, Sydney; and private collections in Australia, Asia and Europe.

Writers:

Kokolakis, FayeNote:
De Lorenzo, CatherineNote:

Date written:

2009

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed