Yhonnie Scarce’s glass works are a glistening, poignant exploration of how nuclear testing affected First Nations people
Yhonnie Scarce, a Kokatha and Nukunu artist, has emerged in recent years as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists.
- Yhonnie Scarce, a Kokatha and Nukunu artist, has emerged in recent years as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists.
- At the same time, it’s an opportunity for Western Australia’s art followers to see a range of works not previously assembled in Perth.
A translucent shower
The exhibition is installed across two levels, conjoined through an architectural void that invites spectacle. In this void, Scarce’s glistening Thunder Raining Poison (2016-17) hangs from the ceiling by hundreds of wires.
Scarce’s works are so steeped in the contemporary art idiom that, despite the centrality of glass throughout this exhibition, we might not at first consider her a “glass artist”. Yet in Thunder Raining Poison, and in her two other “cloud” works, Cloud Chamber (2020) and Death Zephyr (2016), the artist draws our attention to the fragility and beauty of the material.
- This potato-like tuberous root vegetable, which urban-dwelling Australians may not be familiar with, grows throughout the bush.
- The sensitivity of the exhibition’s themes, and perhaps the low lighting, seem to demand quiet in the space.
- Born in Woomera, Scarce is descended from the Lake Eyre Kokatha people and the Southern Flinders Ranges Nukunu people.
Nuclear colonialism
Australian nuclear colonialism is a recurrent theme in the exhibition, with the upstairs gallery including three of Scarce’s Glass Bomb works from the Blue Danube series (2015).
Perhaps the most poignant work with this theme is Fallout Babies (2016). Set in a corner space, this work is partially surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a graveyard with the buried bodies of children from communities that were exposed to the fallout from the bomb testing. The bodies are metaphorically represented by bulbous glass plums, which speak of fertility and promise.
Hollowing Earth (2016-17) is made of materials quite literally infused with trace amounts of uranium. It glows a luminous green under the black-lit gallery. The glass vessels in Hollowing Earth represent bush bananas, another recurrent bush food in Scarce’s aesthetic cypher. The glass surfaces of many of these voluminous glowing bodies are torn while the glass is still hot and malleable.
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Bush bananas also appear in the work In The Dead House (2020), a work previously installed in the old mortuary in Adelaide Botanic Gardens as part the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Laid out on a vintage mortuary trolley, fragile glass bodies are ripped wide open.
The work references early 20th century Adelaide coroner, Ramsay Smith, who profited from exporting Aboriginal remains to British museums. Smith is notorious for having decapitated the corpses – and the bush bananas echo heads and bodies that have been violently disgorged.
Moments of gentle beauty
- Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day includes some moments of gentle beauty found in the love of family and tragic ancestry.
- Both Remember Royalty (2018) and Dinah (2016) belong to stories of trauma, institutionalised racism and inhumane colonial abuse.
- But these are also moments in this exhibition that actively seek to restore pride that was once brutally taken.
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- Art of Peace receives a Linkage Project grant (LP210300068) from the Australian Research Council over three years (2023-2026).
- He is not involved in any way with the curation or exhibition of Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day at AGWA.