Though Sydney-based collaborators Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro work with a variety of media, the main focus of their practice is sculptural. Their work explores questions of modern living and related sociopolitical issues, such as globalism, media culture, and consumerism, with a dark and often cynical wit.

Early projects developed Healy and Cordeiro's relationship with found objects, interventions, and sculptural forms, and assemblages have become a central theme in their work. 2004's Deceased Estate collects all of the detritus in an artist's studio into a ball, bound with string, while a 2006 series of sculptural pieces, Word Lack, Pulp Lack, and World Lack, engages books not as vehicles of content, but rather as sheer mass, hewn to perfectly fit into Ikea bookshelves. Later works further refined the duo's artistic concerns; in the 2006 installation Self Storage, a glass-walled shed stored Healy and Cordeiro's personal possessions — now no longer objects of domestic utility, but Tetris-like building blocks in a consolidated sculpture. The impulse here is to collect, condense, and complicate the everyday into the ontological.

2007's Past Times pursues an antithetical strategy — here, Healy and Cordeiro disassemble a vintage caravan and leave the parts arranged on the gallery floor in a sculptural collage, in which the object is re-imagined as two-dimensional. Paper Trail, from the same year, pursues the artists' fascination with globalism; the installation is built around a Mongolian ger, and palettes of industrial paper draw parallels between contemporary mercantile culture and Mongolian imperialism.

In 2008, the pair is reviving an interest in surrealism. Hot Potato, Please Hold, and Once a Jolly Swagman (desert spice) all marry the mundane with the inexplicable in sculptural forms redolent with an implicit critique of consumerism. Other recent works, such as Kitchen Karma, Salute to the Sun, and White Elephant Stall, return to puns on and references to art criticism, or relate abstract exercises in form and volume.

-Ian Shadwell