Air

A recurring motif in Scarce’s works, the glass yams refer to the traditional bush foods that once sustained the Aboriginal communities living near Maralinga, but which were unable to grow in the scarred earth of the bombs’ aftermath. Suspended and inert, the yams also represent an uneasy anthropomorphism. Haunted by a resemblance to brutalised and damaged organs, their clustered, polymorphous forms suggest the mass suffering of Aboriginal lives. Scarce’s desire to publicly acknowledge the historical trauma of her people compels her ongoing research into the politics of memory, including the ways in which public memorials can give voice to erased histories. In recent years, Scarce has travelled to sites of nuclear disasters around the world, including Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan, to explore how victims of such injustices are honoured and remembered. In glass, Scarce has found a material that conveys the precarity — and the resilience under pressure — of her ancestors, and of those Aboriginal communities who continue to be affected by Maralinga’s violent history. It is a medium she has consistently turned to, finding in its lightness, clarity and transparency the qualities necessary for truth-telling, as she states: ‘In my works that are created for these mourning processes, the shadows that come off the glass represent those people who are not spoken for’. 4 For Cloud Chamber and for Yhonnie Scarce’s other ‘glass bombs’, the medium also represents a vital material connection to Country, in that the silica in the desert sand of the nuclear testing sites was melted to glass by the intense heat of the bomb blasts. 5 Brought into being by the artist’s breath, each individual glass yam contains a small pocket of air that holds material traces of the stories of her ancestors. Together, they rise like a cloud, refusing to be extinguished. NM ‘Each individual glass yam contains a small pocket of air that holds material traces of the stories of Scarce’s ancestors.’ 4 Scarce, quoted in Perkins, p.60. 5 Referring to photographs of the ground near the site of the nuclear test conducted on 21 October 1956, which was dubbed ‘Breakaway’, Scarce comments: ‘It looks like water. The land melted. You can see the fragments of glass that are left there now after the supposed “clean up”: the traces left behind’; quoted in Perkins, p.61. Yhonnie Scarce / Cloud Chamber 2020 (installation views, ‘ Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce ’ , TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Vic. 2020) 165 164 Invisible Invisible