Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro: Ready-made Ruin

Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro: Ready-made Ruin
Formist

Formist’s books are perfect antidotes to the objects that Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro use to make many of their works. While Healy and Cordeiro variously reinvigorate and reappropriate the detritus produced by our current moment of warp-speed, super-global consumer capitalism, Formist’s editions are crafted to last, and make imaginative best uses of the functionalities of the book form itself. Nothing goes to waste in Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro: Ready-made Ruin – not even the interstitial spaces between pages.

The volume visually catalogues the duo’s collaborative works from The Cordial Home Project, 2003, through to Place of the Eels, 2022: a chrome bus vertically installed in outdoor space at Sydney’s Parramatta, in homage to the vehicle used by the Eels rugby league team in the early 1980s. It doesn’t hurt that their work looks better than most when photographed in the gallery, or in an outdoor space. Their large-scale installations occupy the room, the patch of grass, and the photographic frame in a way which never feels full of hot air. Installation and detail shots presented as full-bleed images, often across a double-page spread, make up most of the book’s page count.

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Felicity Fenner’s insightful essay offers compelling interpretations and contextualisations of the work. Opposing, for example, The Cordial Home Project to Tony Cragg’s Stack series, Fenner explores how Healy and Cordeiro reference art and literary historical materials to articulate, through differentiation, their own aims. Fenner’s essay is annotated with the page numbers on which images of each mentioned work can be found. This is a deceptively simple example of Formist’s commitment to offering readers an inventive and useable object. It is also an apposite echo of Healy and Cordeiro’s own thoroughgoing, almost mystical numbering of the components of many of their installations.

The only other “editorial” text in the volume is Fram Kitagawa’s foreword, which reflects primarily on the artists’ recent contribution to the Oku-Noto International Art Festival, ne sunao ja nakue / Sorry, I’m not straightforward, 2021. This sensitive short text is given in the original Japanese and translated into English by Justin and Sayo Jones – a nice touch, too, that this translation is also a collaborative work.

The rest of this book’s magic lies in between the pages. In a gesture perhaps to the artists’ interest in flat-packing, or possibly to their investigations of “in-between” states of transit and travel, each page of the book is folded in two. These pages, then, also work as openable “pockets” in which we can glimpse additional images, many of which appear to be drawn from personal archives of the artists, collaborators, and friends.

Deftly shepherded into being by an editorial team including Fenner, Mark Gowing, Naomi Riddle, and Sandie Don, the book is also printed with an original font by Formist Foundry. Though perhaps eventually its paper may break down, it’s hard to imagine such an object falling victim to the obsolescence which fascinates its subjects.

 

Erin McFadyen is a writer and editor based on Gadigal land. She is the deputy editor of Artist Profile, and a managing editor at The Suburban Review.

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