Installations

Cloud Nation

Related to City Art
Installed 2018
Green SquareContemporary artPublic art
A large white aeroplane is suspended from a ceiling, viewed from below. There is miniature scenery on its wings.
Detail of the sculpture: one wing of the aeroplane with a miniature mountain, farmland, trees, and several houses on it.
People look through the window of Green Square Library at night. Inside is an aeroplane suspended from the ceiling, with green grass-like patches on the body and wing, and a volcano on the nose.
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A repurposed vintage aircraft is suspended inside the library, its surface transformed into a meticulously crafted miniature world.

Artist: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro
Curator: Jess Scully

Artwork description

Cloud Nation is a playful, enchanting and imaginative artwork referencing multiple themes including fictional narratives, migration and the cultural exchange made possible by air travel. It takes the notion of the inner homeland people carry within, turning it into a fantastic vision.

Small-scale model elements reference themes of migration and fantasy on the Beechcraft Travel Air, recalling the fictional island of Laputa from Jonathan Swift’s classic novel Gulliver’s Travels. Laputa is a flying island inhabited by people with a love of learning and culture.

People can engage with the artwork from different points including monoculars provided in the plaza to view the plane in close detail from outside the library.

“I like to think of people saying I’ll meet you at the aeroplane. I like to think of the work as being part of something. I think artwork is interesting outside of the gallery, integrated into people’s lives.”

– Sean Cordeiro (2018)

Artists

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro are artists who reclaim and transform the fallout of consumer society in their practice. Combining a playful sense of humour and an engagement with art historical precedents, their work is characterised by the deconstruction and reinvention of prefabricated structures and the assemblage of accumulated objects into extraordinary sculptures and installations.

Healy and Cordeiro’s practice reflects a preoccupation with the dynamics of global mobility – the networks, standards and financial systems that enable and restrict the movement of people and goods in the modern era. Creating tensions between order and disorder, their works are shaped by traditional sculptural concerns such as mass, form and scale, however they also incorporate the expressive potential of motion, speaking to the way things move and change over time.

Anna Davis, Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, exh.cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2012.

Healy and Cordeiro are represented by Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Sydney.

 

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