Yhonnie Scarce

Yhonnie Scarce (b. 1974) was born on a military base in Woomera, a small South Australian township approximately 450 kilometres north of Adelaide. Belonging to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples – whose traditional lands cover a large expanse north of Port Augusta, stretching from Lake Torrens in the east to the Gawler Ranges in the west, and the southern Flinders Ranges, respectively – today, Scarce spends her time living and working between Melbourne and Adelaide.

Scarce began working with glass during her studies at the University of South Australia in 2003 and was the first Aboriginal student to graduate in the discipline. “When I was training as a glassblower, there was this idea that you would move on to do more functional objects. I couldn't see my culture being in a drinking vessel or something like that.”[1] Instead, Scarce quickly developed the recurring and enduring motif of blown glass bush foods – silky pear, long yams, bush plums and bush bananas – as anthropomorphic objects representing the bodies, lives and stories of her family members and Aboriginal community.

Soon after graduating, Scarce also began visiting and researching memorials internationally. Winning the 2008 Qantas Foundation Encouragement for Australian Contemporary Art Award through Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF) enabled Scarce to visit Berlin, in particular Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This trip later proved to be instrumental in developing her own practice around memorialisation.

[1] Daniel Browning, “Yhonnie Scarce: ‘Australia is very good at forgetting the past.’” Ocula, 2 June, 2021

As part of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s inaugural Tarnanthi Festival in 2015, Scarce produced an installation of over two thousand hand-blown streaky green glass yams, her largest and most ambitious work at the time. Taking on the form of an atomic fallout cloud, Thunder Raining Poison (2015) directly addressed a history of British nuclear testing during the 1950s and 60s in Maralinga, within the Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA) – a weapons research facility and defence area used for testing war material. Having lived on the southeastern edge of the WPA, Scarce grew up knowing the history of the region, the removal of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people and desecration of their traditional lands as well as direct accounts of nuclear survivors. ‘It’s probably one of the most hidden histories within Australia, not just South Australia.”[2]

A vital process in developing Thunder Raining Poison was to undertake fieldwork. Scarce took six glass associates from the JamFactory’s hot shop to visit Breakaway – an historic bomb site among the first suite of nuclear tests conducted in 1956. Breakaway was significant due to the heat of the blast. With temperatures exceeding 1600°C degrees, the explosion transformed the silica of the desert sand into a field of radioactive glass.

[2] Elizabeth Flux, “In Conversation with Yhonnie Scarce”, Broadsheet, 13 July, 2021

For the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres Scarce unearthed another South Australian history, this time in relation to the ‘Dead House’ – a small nineteenth century brick building on the grounds of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. Once used as a morgue to the Adelaide Lunatic Asylum, it was workplace to the Scottish physician, William Ramsay Smith, who in 1903 came under government enquiry for his post-mortem practices. Using his position to illicitly dissect and remove human remains, Smith is acknowledged as one of the most prolific colonial collectors and exporters of Aboriginal bones and soft tissue.[3]

Scarce’s installation of thirty glass bush bananas, In the Dead House (2020), occupied the brick building. A native plant to South Australia, the fruit was handblown in alabaster white for its spectral and unpredictable properties and then flayed open, echoing the treatment of Aboriginal people and their bodies under Ramsay Smith.

[3] Claire Scobie, ‘The return of the bones’, Meanjin, vol. 68, no. 4, Summer 2009, p. 127