Yhonnie SCARCE Precarious movement

Suspended in plume-like formations, hundreds of icicle-shaped glass forms are looming. Was that a sound? They’re alive in the otherwise silent space, swaying slightly in your wake. Carrying life that was literally breathed into them by their makers. Carrying the life of those who were affected by nuclear plumes at Maralinga. A precarious movement, they are glass, fragile perhaps, but also strong.

I vividly remember this feeling, evoked by Yhonnie Scarce’s , which I saw as part of ‘The National’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2017. In the exhibition catalogue, Daniel Browning wrote, ‘The objects Scarce creates are literal in so much as they mimic the organic form of bush foods once harvested by Aboriginal people across the inland. There are elongated long yams, bush bananas and bush plums. But in Scarce’s work they are totems, rarely standing