Air

Yhonnie Scarce Kokatha and Nukunu peoples Born 1973, Woomera, South Australia Lives and works Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Yhonnie Scarce’s Cloud Chamber 2020 arrests an atomic cloud at the moment of its greatest devastation, as it rises and disperses following an imagined nuclear blast. As if still registering the shock of impact, 1000 elongated glass yams hang in the air like inverted raindrops, their lustrous dark green forms eerily capturing the light. Clouds are often an encouraging sign of long-awaited rain in Scarce’s remote desert country in South Australia, yet this unsettled cumulus suggests something altogether less welcome — and it lingers, refusing to dissipate, a dark, toxic plume raining poison on the land. Cloud Chamber is the third in a sextet of hand-blown glass yam installations whose beauty and fragility belies the brutal devastation of their subjects. Proceeding from Thunder Raining Poison 2015 and Death Zephyr 2017, Cloud Chamber was conceived as an ethereal monument to the calamitous British nuclear tests carried out at Maralinga, in South Australia, between 1953 and 1963, conducted without the permission of the Traditional Owners. 1 Taking inspiration from historical photographs, Scarce envisages the full virulent force of the radiation clouds, whose silent drift across the land — extending as far as the artist’s home town of Woomera — was observed by the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara peoples. 2 The clouds’ dire legacy — one of significant, lasting nuclear contamination of the land and radiation sickness for its inhabitants — still reverberates today. In giving memorial form to this cataclysmic event, Scarce exhumes a history that is cloaked in secrecy — a sort of official amnesia. Importantly, she also bears witness to the blighted land and to her ancestors’ experiences of disease and dispossession: ‘The Country there wants to speak, I feel. Areas where something horrible has happened retain that memory’. 3 1 The title of the work refers to a sealed apparatus containing a supersaturated vapour of water and alcohol used by nuclear physicists to track uranium particles. 2 Scarce recalls: ‘My extended family was still living at Koonibba when the bombs were being set off. There’s stories about the substances from those clouds coming down as far as Tjutjuna and nappies being burnt on the clothesline, skin rashes that people were being told was measles, and ongoing issues of cancer’; see ‘Cloud Chamber: Yhonnie Scarce in conversation with Hetti Perkins’, in Hetti Perkins (curator), Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce [exhibition catalogue], TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Vic., 2020, p.61. 3 Scarce, quoted in Perkins, p.62. Yhonnie Scarce / Cloud Chamber 2020 (installation view, ‘Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce’, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Vic. 2020) TO BE UPDATED 163 Invisible