In The Plastic Menagerie Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy continue their conceptual and material interrogation of habitat. Part of a generation who can only dream of home ownership, their work questions our attachment to place and property. In this work they have collaborated to construct a nest of museum showcases or vitrines and housed within each vitrine is an animal shaped inflatable toy. Among the menagerie, a wide-eyed Orca whale and a smiling crocodile speak of our incessant taming of the world and our absurd tendency to anthropomorphise even the most exotic beast. The vitrines are stacked on top of each other in a manner more reminiscent of pet shop chaos than the order of a natural history museum. This controlled chaos connects The Plastic Menagerie to their earlier work featuring the act of deconstructing and reconstructing familiar objects within the gallery space.

Each vitrine in The Plastic Menagerie is made from laminated pine, the type of material used to make inexpensive, ubiquitous furniture. Rather than the elegant handcrafted vitrines of the museum, these ‘storage solutions’ have a certain DIY appeal. Is it possible that the work is supplied as a ready to assemble animal menagerie where the animals can be inflated and safely housed within their flat-pack vitrines?

Installed within a manner of minutes, this menagerie offers a portable and compact living solution to zoo overcrowding. The Plastic Menagerie also offers a possible panacea to curators and collectors who can assemble at will their own museum collections. But what of the decline of the species wrought by slow leakages and sagging plastic? Are these creatures doomed to become deflatables? Unlike the broken glass animals that symbolise a young woman’s awakening to the perils of the world in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, this plastic fantastic inflatable animal kingdom offers a certain resistance to reality.