Everyday materials transformed into a large-scale sculpture

 

In Future Remnant, Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro transform everyday materials into an extraordinary, large-scale sculpture. In a deliberately absurd juxtaposition, a large dinosaur skeleton, meticulously constructed, climbs over makeshift Ikea storage furniture — the ubiquitous kind that appears in many households and magically reappears on the street whenever the city council collects unwanted household rubbish.

View our installation time-lapse and watch as this collection is transformed into a humorous new configuration, a playful reinvention that creates an extraordinary installation hinting at a time before humans and consumerism.

Watch | Installation time-lapse

Claire Healy, Artist, Australia b.1971 / Sean Cordeiro, Artist, Australia b.1974 / Future Remnant 2011 / Resin, steel, plywood, laminated MDF, plastic cable / Purchased 2013 with funds from the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © The artists

The artists are interested in pre-fabricated structures, and the way these express society’s consumer fascination with homewares and other material purchases that accumulate clutter but are of very little worth. The dinosaur, long since extinct, existed well before shopping and humankind. Deliberately humorous, the work also hints at the longer term damage that can be done by our aspirations towards wealth, status and material culture.

Relocation and uncertain economic circumstances are some of the ideas explored through Cordeiro and Healy’s practice and their ongoing interest in both the structures in which we live and the material possessions with which we surround ourselves.

#QAGOMA