Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, The Quiet Earth (detail). Watercolour pen and acrylic on canvas, 1750 x 980mm, 2016. Courtesy of the artists.
In Harbouring, Healy and Cordeiro present two linked projects that share commonalities of time, memorialisation, and expanded painting.
“Daddy Danse Macabre” is a project inspired by the intricately painted skulls of Hallstatt Beinhaus. Claire and Sean’s painted skulls commemorate the dates of new words [walkman, vajazzle, mullet] added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Highlighting the varying time lags between a word’s invention and its inclusion in the OED, this work positions language both as a dynamic living phenomenon and as a fixed institutional record.
Their second project began as a direct response to the environment of the Te Whare Hēra studio which Claire Healy describes as the “most beautiful residency in the world”. Faced with a constantly changing landscape view from the Clyde Quay Wharf residency Claire and Sean were drawn to experiments in landscape painting. As non-painters, they are self-deprecatingly adopting the role of plein air painters. Claire and Sean have sourced landscapes from Aotearoa/New Zealand horror films and reproduced these via an exaggerated four-colour separation process which is then painstakingly filled in with pigment. The technique evokes both digital reproduction and a kind of cartoon Impressionism.
Read Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s essay Harbouring on their website.
