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The Village Idiom brings together new works by Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro that emerge from everyday life and their encounters with the landscape surrounding their Blackheath studio.
Moving between the natural and the manmade, the exhibition considers how objects, pathways, and language shape the ways we observe and inhabit the world.
Across the exhibition, discarded metallic forms are overlaid with motifs drawn from flora and ornament, where traces of human presence and the cycles of growth and decay intersect. What emerges is a meditation on perception and rediscovery, where objects become vessels for reflection and the boundaries between observer and environment remain in constant flux. -
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The Village Idiom- A sketchy situation.
It’s natural that our everyday life informs our art practice. While toiling over a hot artwork, the inner dialogue that bubbles away chews over the experiences of the day: informing and imbuing the artwork with incantation-like intent in our Blackheath studio.
One of the positive things about living on top of a mountain is our ready access to the wilds. Walking through the wilderness is a funny meeting of opposites. For instance, you must be careful where you place your feet as the ground is naturally uneven but at the same time it’s imperative that you have a good look around, otherwise you may as well be pounding away at a treadmill, you gotta enjoy the view! You are both within the scene and observing the scene. It is a constant oscillation between scales: the micro and macroscopic.
While strolling through the bush noticing insects, fungi, rocks and plants, you can also observe human traces such as graffiti, cigarette butts and crushed drink cans; after the bushfires of 2019 it was also possible to re-discover abandoned motor vehicles that had been lying unnoticed in the scrub for decades. Due to the waxing and waning popularity of certain walking routes, these hulking masses of metal had become lost through flora regrowth.
The shifting of these paths makes it possible to both lose and rediscover what lies within the wilds. It is a similar process that happens with thought and language: the changing words and phrases we commonly use cause us to both misplace and re-discover ideas. Idiomatic phrases such as Kick the bucket or Let sleeping dogs lie, hot-wires our mind by expressing complex ideas swiftly without needing lengthy literal explanations. As Del the Funky Homosapien says ‘We keep the funk alive by talking in idiom’.
Our latest show The Village Idiom is a visualisation of our perambulatory experiences of the manmade and the natural. Our re-combination of nature motifs upon discarded metallic objects harks back to celebrations of nature seen in Rococo ornamentation, Qing Dynasty porcelain and Romani Vardo wagons. We live in an object design age of minimalism: the visual whistles and bells have been Mari Kondo-ed into oblivion. Objects of contemplation which celebrate harmony between man and nature are now the stuff of porcelain beer mugs. The resulting vibe is clean but too austere for good mental health.
Objects like cups with nature scenes painted on them or horse-drawn wagons resplendent in painted vines and flowers remind us that we are both within the scene and observing the scene. The object becomes an aesthetic canvas and a philosophical vessel of contemplation. The experience is summed up in Haruki Murakami’s Blowjob/Hegelian scenario in Kafka on the Shore “A person is not merely conscious of self and object as seperate entities, but through the projection of the self via the mediation of the object is volitionally able to gain a deeper understanding of the self”
Not bad for a Walk in the Park, eh? -
