Ready-Made Ruin is the definitive monograph documenting the celebrated artists’ work over the past two decades.
Formist Editions is proud to release Ready-made Ruin, an immersive publication marking twenty years of collaboration by acclaimed Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro. Covering two decades of work, the book features a fascinating essay from curator Felicity Fenner, while a visual inventory of the duo’s diverse practice is unveiled across more than 400 pages.
The many works presented include 2003’s The Cordial Home Project, their first foray in shared artmaking that attracted critical attention, where Healy & Cordeiro reconstructed a suburban weatherboard house scheduled for demolition, neatly stacking its parts into a large-scale installation; Lifespan, created for the 2009 Venice Biennale, made from 175,218 VHS video cassettes; Par Avion (2011), the pair’s first aircraft turned artwork; Where we’ve been, where we’re going, why? (2011), Lego works replicating media images of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster; We Hunt Mammoth (2015), a sculptural installation comprising 121 separate Honda car parts, bound in traditional Japanese packaging of bamboo and jute; and You Are Here (2020), where Australian Air Force surplus aircraft parts where turned into Japanese kites.
Accompanying the artworks is a personal and revealing set of process images, approximately one thousand behind-the-scenes photographs, printed in gold and concealed within the specially folded pages, like treasure buried within the publication.
