Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park Exhibition Kit

The day we went away is the earliest artwork in Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park and was made by Scarce when she was in the final year of her undergraduate degree at the South Australian School of Art. The work consists of a small, found suitcase, perhaps designed for a child, which is filled with forty hand-blown, transparent and colourless glass elements in the form of bush bananas. Rather than being placed on a plinth or housed safely in a protective acrylic case the artwork is set directly on the gallery floor, with the lid of the suitcase leant against the wall. This placement, where the piece can be easily overlooked or even accidentally stepped-on, creates a very vulnerable situation for the delicate glass forms inside.

The effect of near-invisibility and defencelessness created by this visual language can be understood in relation to the subject of the piece, the Stolen Generations, which refers to the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families to live within colonial households. These children, often infants, were frequently exploited as unpaid labour in the homes of non-Indigenous families, while also being prevented from seeing their parents, speaking their language or maintaining cultural practices. 

The bush banana is an Indigenous food that grows on Yhonnie Scarce’s Country. Within this artwork you might analyse the suitcase contents, the bush bananas, as a way for the suitcase’s imagined owner to keep some part of their Country with them when they were taken away, as a precious, fragile connection to home.

Discussion questions

• Have you seen a suitcase like this before? Do you think the artist made the suitcase herself? If yes/no, why?
• What kind of person do you think owns this suitcase – how old are they, and what makes you think that?
• Why are bush bananas the only things that have been packed in the suitcase? What does the bush bananas’ materiality (the material they are made from – glass) add to the artwork? How is the choice of material significant?

This work comprises sixty glass bush bananas, each held separately in its own scientific beaker, lined up on a shelf. The forms are blown from dark coloured glass that has an iridescent mirrored surface. Each of the glass fruits has been damaged in some way–some are cut or cracked, and others completely shattered, with only shards remaining in the bottom of the beaker. 

The title The cultivation of whiteness refers to a racist belief held by nineteenth-century white colonists that ‘whiteness’ had to be protected from becoming ‘denigrated’ through mixing with Aboriginal people. This belief led to harmful practices being enacted upon Aboriginal people, including non-consensual medical experimentation and scientific testing. These pseudo-scientific (meaning falsely or mistakenly regarded as based on scientific methods) practices dehumanised Aboriginal people, and caused great physical and psychological harm. 

In this work, each bush banana can be understood as representing an individual who has sustained some sort of injury as a result of ‘scientific racism’, and the practices carried out in the name of the cultivation of whiteness.

The cuts to the glass, made by the artist using an angle grinder, are metaphoric of medical experimentation – like scars left after a serious operation. Similarly, the shattered fruit can be thought of as instances when an Aboriginal person has not survived the violence they sustained, but whose story and memory persists. Finally, by catching the viewers’ reflection and bouncing it back at them, the mirrored finish on the glass forms prompts them to consider how their own history is entwined with the histories of the unnamed people on which the work is based.

Discussion questions

• Have you ever seen a mirror used in an artwork before? How does the presence of your own reflection make you feel when looking at this artwork?
• Why do you think Yhonnie Scarce has chosen to use readymade scientific beakers rather than blow her own? What special meaning or associations do they bring to the artwork?
• Yhonnie Scarce has used bush foods to represent her people in this artwork. What is another form you could use in your own artwork that could stand in place of an actual representation? What metaphorical significance does your chosen object have?

Missile park is a large-scale installation in three parts, each taking the form of a rudimentary (meaning limited or basic) shelter, constructed from corrugated zinc sheets and painted in bitumen. From outside, the only noticeable difference between each is the different roof type – one is flat, another is peaked, and another is curved. The door to one structure is closed, but visitors can enter two at a time to view the interior. Inside the structure is darkness, with holes left by past screws in the zinc the only source of light. These pinpricks appear star-like, reproducing the experience of a night sky in the desert, far away from city lights. Also inside is a heavy steel table on which 20 large, grey glass orbs rest. Each globular form has a long glass tendril rising from the top. These are reminiscent of either bush plums, which Scarce has included in past works, or cartoon-like bombs, with fuses ready for lighting. The door to the another structure is off its hinges and leaning to the side of the opening, while the door to the last structure is ajar and loosely chained. Each of these also contain twenty of the grey glass forms, also atop steel tables.

Scarce has a research driven practice and travels often, recently she travelled around remote SA with the exhibition curators Max Delany (ACCA’s Artistic Director), Liz Nowell (Director of the IMA), and Lisa Waup (Artist and past ACCA exhibitor), to garner inspiration for this new commission and to research family history. The structures in the work are based on vernacular (common/everyday) Australian architecture, particularly temporary buildings established by the military at Maralinga during nuclear testing in the region during the 1950s. The bitumen finish has a dual significance. First, it references a dark, oily substance that reportedly fell onto these buildings as part of the fallout during the nuclear testing period. Secondly, Scarce’s father helped build the roads in Woomera, and so bitumen becomes an important reference to the artist’s personal and family history. Scarce has also travelled internationally for fieldwork to research memorial sites of nuclear trauma, Indigenous genocide and cultural erasure; she has travelled to Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Hiroshima, Maralinga, New York, Wounded Knee and former Yugoslavia.

Discussion questions

• What does it mean for a material to be ‘corrugated’? What is the structural benefit of corrugated materials? Can you list two materials that can be corrugated?
• Why do you think an artist would be interested in Australian vernacular architecture (sheds/old buildings)?
• How do you think the artist has made these structures and their contents? Are they artworks or architecture – or both? 
• How has Yhonnie Scarce embedded/represented Australian history in her new commission? How is this relevant to your own context?