Yhonnie Scarce’s installations address the contested colonial history of Australia through the materiality and politics of glass. Belonging to the Kokatha and Nukunu people, she was born in Woomera, a town set up by the Australian government as a site for rocket launch experiments. Y. Scarce’s artworks trace personal histories and memorialise the impact of British government nuclear tests on Aboriginal lives.

Trained as a glass blower at the University of South Australia (2003), and with a Master of Fine Art from Monash University (2010), Scarce suspends or congregates glass-made replicas of bush bananas, yams, bush plums, bombs and bodies. Her glass installations evoke desecrated organs, the forcible removal of babies and the embodied experience of mushroom clouds. Her glass artworks – presented in different contexts such as on a hospital crib, inside a bucket, in a scientific vessel, tucked in an apron, in front of an archival image, or as cascading in space – highlight the visceral relationship between modernity, scientific experimentation, and colonial power. Glass as a medium, a product of heat and sand, materialises the impact of nuclear tests in crystallizing and transforming the desert sand. In Blue Danube (2015), glass yams – native tubers used as food – lie encased in a glass bomb, referencing Britain’s first operational nuclear bomb tested in Maralinga. The work captures the agony of displacement and the control of Aboriginal lives by the military state. In Absence (2019), commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, is a vertical monument made of black-painted timber, decorated inside with yam-like glass pieces. The form echoes the hollow space of different Aboriginal sites such as eel traps, hollowed-out trees used for smoking fish or water cascades. Experienced as a meditational space, the work stands as an ode to the longstanding but oft denied sophisticated agricultural practices of Aboriginal people pre-colonisation. In Missile Park (2021), inside dark, corrugated iron sheds covered with bitumen, a steel table topped with bush plums represents Aboriginal lives lost in the British nuclear tests in Maralinga in 1950s and 1960s. These shed monuments draw on the artist’s research into memorials and her particular interest in Soviet brutalist architecture.

Y. Scarce’s ongoing research and curatorial collaboration with Melbourne-based artist Lisa Radford (1976–) The Image Is Not Nothing (Concrete Archives) started in 2018 and engages with nuclear sites around the world, such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Holocaust and Soviet war memorials. This collaboration intertwines archival research with artworks that address the impacts of nuclear tests worldwide and the history of White Australia’s politics.

A turning point in Y. Scarce’s career was her solo exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne) and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane) in 2021. Y. Scarce’s residency and exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (2022) were pivotal in raising her international profile, while in the Palais de Tokyo group show Réclamer La Terre (2022), her work was curated along with other ecofeminist artists.