Yhonnie Scarce
Yhonnie Scarce is an artist who looks at identity and heritage in her artwork. Scarce own background comes from Nukunu and Kokatha Mula people. She uses her Aboriginally to bring Aboriginal history to attention. She doesn’t escape from the truth and calls for her audience to absorbs her message. She doesn’t create art purely for aesthetics, yet creates beautiful art that reflects prejudice and the horrors that Aboriginals fought and continue to fight within colonised Australia. Scarce’s glass works are ‘documentary’ in style, to record the past and but to also set up a mirror up to what happens today. She is the first graduate using glass as a medium for art with Aboriginal heritage from the University of South Australia, and the first to use glass in a contemporary art manner. She has pulled glass “out of its crafty comfort zone” and activated it with a highly politicised message[1]. The use of glass literally places the viewer within her art, creating work that is “deeply personal, these vessels, present a permeable, vulnerable skin that is incisive, dark and crystalline.” [2]
Her bush fruit and yam glass figures are hand blown, each with their own little unique Aboriginal identities. The brilliance of using glass to represent Aboriginals is that “is quite fragile but… tough.”[3] Even if glass does smash it will still exist, just holding a different shape[4]. Standing in for a metaphor on the treatment of Aboriginals and how with all the knocks they, as a huge collective community, resist and grow stronger. Part of the problem with colonisation lies within the loss of individual voices, instead being grouped into the one defining term: “Aboriginal”. Scarce has given her work individual representation. They are one piece of art collectively, but each piece of glass is different from the next, each it’s own piece of art. Scarce goes beyond creating Aboriginal art with a political message that can sit on a canvas in a gallery and shock its audience. She effectively uses her medium’s qualities for their message. The glass reflects the audience, they can see themselves within her work, eliminating a black or white audience. The focus coming down to how the individual sees themselves in the histories she recreates with her own breath.
Scarce’s family history inspired a lot of her work, as well as a broader Aboriginal history. She uses part of her identity in artworks such as Weak and Colour but Strong in Blood, 2013 for the 18th Sydney Biennale. Her own linage which she felt was a matter for discussion, not by choice, at boarding school growing up. This piece of work takes place in a metaphorical laboratory, the black glass yams being intrusively investigated with foreign objects like medical scissors. Hospital wheelie tables host the mixed black and clear yams, seemingly off for further experiments. In an interview for Radio Adelaide she discusses how she has been judged for having lighter skin, an argument she feels is completely unnecessary[5]. Highlighting another problem with the treatment of Aboriginals having to validate their heritage. Scarce believes that her fair skin “denies her identity and culture and the important values and beliefs that stem from it.” [6] Her work directly responds to this stereotyping that Aboriginals face, not limiting her work to her own identity but how western notions of identity are perceived.
Scarce’s work Thunder Raining Poison, 2015, has been featured recently in the Tarnanthi Festival, in her largest installation to date: 2000 individually blown glass yams are hung in "a five-metre high bomb cloud.”[7] The yam-bomb-cloud represent the atomic bomb testing conducted at Maralinga in the north of South Australia between 1953 and 1963: "Apparently when it first happened there were sheets of glass all over the landscape but now there's little shards that look like glitter."[8] This work was particularly personal for Scarce who was returning home for the festival to South Australia. Born in Woomera which is a particularly loaded village in South Australia that boasts the “largest land testing range in the world.”[9] This developed into part of her family history, growing up having knowledge of the tests and their impact on Aboriginal people.[10]
The energy Scarce channels in her work is so engulfing, she “creates work about things people don't necessarily talk about or are too scared to talk about." [11] Yet her work doesn’t isolate an audience, but the work is still political. She says “if you don’t want to engage in this conversation then the solution is simple – don’t look at my art. But that doesn’t mean it will go away.”[12] Scarce’s work is so beautiful and contains so many layers. Her popularity rests on this balance of aesthetically breath-taking art and work that engages the audience’s emotions. From tiny yams incased within nuclear bombs for the Art Basel in Hong-Kong; to the Venice Biennale with black glass yams put to rest within perspex coffins; and travelling to other countries for Unmapping the End of the World, bringing the conversation back to Australia’s policies on Aboriginal communities and Tony Abbott’s comments on the Aboriginal “lifestyle choice.” [13] Yhonnie Scarce follows a theme surrounding Aboriginal injustices in her work and her passion to unveil it makes her an inspiration.
Bibliography
Allas, Tess. “Yhonnie Scarce: Fragile Histories”. Deadly: In-between Heaven and Hell. Tandanya 2012.
Browing, Daniel, “Unmapping the End of the World: is art a time machine?” ABC. October 19, 2015. http://www.abc.net.au/radionat...
“Charlie King, Aunty Eva Richardson and Yhonnie Scarce” AWAYE (soundclip). ABC. April 3,, 2010.
“Interview with Heartland Exhibition Artist, Yhonnie Scarce.” Radio Adelaide (soundclip). August 3, 2013. https://radio.adelaide.edu.au/interivew-with-heartland-exhibtion-artist-yhonnie-scarce/
Johnston, Ryan. “Yhonnie Scarce” Das Platforms. Issue 27. June 6, 2013 http://dasplatforms.com/magazi...
Joseph, Dione. “Witness to Our Journey”: Interview With Yhonnie Scarce” Right Now, May 27, 2013
http://rightnow.org.au/artwork/witness-to-our-journey-interview-with-yhonnie-scarce/
Kemp, Jemima. “Shards: Judy Watson, Yhonnie Scarce, Nici Cumpston”, Artlink. Vol 28, No 4. 2008 https://www.artlink.com.au/articles.cfm?id=3195
Kimberley, Jonathan and Scarce, Yhonnie. “Unmapping the End of the World” Artlink, Vol. 35, No. 2, Jun 2015
Llewellyn, Jane. “Profile: Yhonnie Scarce” The Adelaide Review. October 22, 2015. http://adelaidereview.com.au/a...
Slade, Lisa. “In Spite of Colonisation: Yhonnie Scarce” Broadsheet, Issue 42.2, 2013
http://www.cacsa.org.au/Wordpr...
Taylor, Andrew. “Tarnanthi Festival: How a bomb blast inspired glass artist Yhonnie Scarce” Sydney Morning Herald, August 14, 2015
“Theme 1: Symbolism In Glass” Jam Factory
http://glass-exhibition.jamfactory.com.au/files/theme_1.pdf
Thomas, Jared. “Art of Glass: Yhonnie Scarce.” Artlink. Vol 30, No1. 2010
“Yhonnie Scarce” Dianne Tanzer Gallery. http://diannetanzergallery.net...
“Yhonnie Scarce” 19th Biennale of Sydney, 2014 https://www.biennaleofsydney.c...
“Yhonnie Scarce” Mildura Palimpsest Biennale, October 2015, http://mildurapalimpsestbiennale.com/artists-thinkers/yhonnie-scarce/
[1] Carrie Miller, “Award Winners: Yhonnie Scarce” Art Collector, Issue 47, January - March 2009.
[2] Jonathan Kimberley and Yhonnie Scarce “Unmapping the End of the World”. Artlink, Vol. 35, No. 2, Jun 2015.
[3] Jane Llewellyn, “Profile: Yhonnie Scarce” The Adelaide Review. October 22, 2015.
[4] Andrew Taylor, “Tarnanthi Festival: How a bomb blast inspired glass artist Yhonnie Scarce” Sydney Morning Herald, August 14, 2015
[5] “Interview with Heartland Exhibition Artist, Yhonnie Scarce.” Radio Adelaide (soundclip). August 3, 2013.
[6] Jared Thomas, “Art of Glass: Yhonnie Scarce.” Artlink, Vol 30, No1, 2010
[7] Andrew Taylor, “Tarnanthi Festival: How a bomb blast inspired glass artist Yhonnie Scarce”
[8] Ibid
[9] “About the Woomera Prohibited Area” Australian Government Department of Defense.
[10] Jane Llewellyn, “Profile: Yhonnie Scarce”
[11] Andrew Taylor, “Tarnanthi Festival: How a bomb blast inspired glass artist Yhonnie Scarce”
[12] Dione Joseph, “Witness to Our Journey”: Interview with Yhonnie Scarce” Right Now, May 27, 2013
[13] Jonathan Kimberley, and Yhonnie Scarce, “Unmapping the End of the World”. Artlink, Vol. 35, No. 2, Jun 2015.
