THESATURDAYPAPER.COM.AU Nº. 330 23 Visual art

Yhonnie Scarce and ’s work in Looking Glass draws a paradoxical sense of life from historical atrocities.

Traumatic reflections Installation view of Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce. Andrew Curtis

Declan Fry yams’ tumescence is curiously alive: look blue notes features various objects – a phantom One of the exhibition’s most provocative is an essayist, critic and proud descendant closely and you can see them faintly swaying, imprint of Australia, a “confi rmed Covid-19 pieces, 40 pairs of blackfellows’ ears, lawn hill of the Yorta Yorta. a vertiginous mushroom-cloud shape. They deaths” headline, the loping hills of an ECG station, dares the viewer to confront Australia’s feel simultaneously contained and opaque: heart readout – all limned through what ongoing history of colonial violence. Hammered the light falls and dies on their surfaces. appears to be calligraphic strokes of blue paint. into the wall with rusty nails, the work is A comparable sense of paradox and In fact it is cyanotype, a photographic printing based on the grotesque pastime of settler Jack As you approach the TarraWarra Museum of attenuated life defi nes the bush plums of process developed in the mid-19th century. Watson: a wealthy, educated man, Watson Art, the fi rst thing you notice is the building’s Fallout Babies. The plums form a collection of Afterimages recur in Watson’s canvases: nailed 40 pairs of Aboriginal ears to his slab hut solid, indestructible quality. Despite the clean hypotheses and questions, unknowns. With their in spot fi res, our country is burning now, fi res homestead in Lawn Hill on Waanyi Country, Modernist lines and angles, its structure slender, tapered stems, they recall funeral vases are rendered as weather patterns, ghost reliefs proudly displayed for the benefi t of visitors. yields the sense of something organic. At the awaiting wreaths. Made – like most of Scarce’s of native fl ora placed mutely at the centre. To The audience is implicated in this entrance hangs Wurundjeri elder Aunty Joy work here – using hand-blown glass, the breath the left, the hottest part of fl ame – a burst of macabre scene, forced to make sense of its Murphy’s donated Bunjil feather, symbolising involved in their creation echoes the winds blue exploding outwards – is seemingly ready galvanic brutality. Some of the earlobes are the eagle who created the Wurundjeri Country spreading nuclear fallout over Country, to consume the delicate palimpsest of native grouped like secret sharers: two side by side; upon which the museum stands. poisoning mob and settler alike. A photo of fl ora and fauna. three or four communing in a corner. Each In conversation with –Nukunu infant graves taken by the artist at Woomera Watson’s fi lm invasion, one of three faces out as though listening in on the viewer. If artist Yhonnie Scarce, whose work appears Cemetery – antiseptic black-and-white – recordings in the exhibition’s sole video the eyes of the Mona Lisa follow those who view alongside Waanyi artist Judy Watson’s in the reminds the viewer not only of those whose loss installation, experiments with similar them around the room, these ears are poised to exhibition Looking Glass, I wondered whether is memorialised, but of those who never were. concepts of layering, as diff erent fi lms play overhear their whispering audience. What might the Earth’s sense of timelessness and infi nite In Only a mother could love them, glass simultaneously to create distortions and they hear? Shame, guilt, disbelief, disgust? yielding might help to explain events such as bush plums sit atop a rusted medical trolley, unusual interactions. invasion documents the standing stone, grevillea contains patterns the nuclear testing at Maralinga – a traumatic recalling children born without limbs. Solid artist’s trips to England, Ireland and Scotland that recall netting or mesh. In standing stone, history Scarce explores in her work using and opaque, each contains a hole, suggesting a in 2019 with her family. Videos of standing ashes to ashes, the scales repeat, but this hand-blown glass – or uranium mining in her way in; yet they contain only darkness. Nucleus stones are overlaid with a string object from the time in ochre; I was reminded of boot treads home state of . arranges glass bush plums on top of tables, Gulf of Carpentaria, along with objects such as imprinted in earth, or the relief of tyre tracks. The Earth is indestructible, at least in the each pocked with apertures and openings, grevillea, kangaroo grass and gumbi gumbi. The work is overlaid by mottled and blotched sense that destruction is a measure of fragility topped by umbilical-cord-like stems. Some The string reminded me of Boodjamulla, sunburnt eff ects, with Watson “dancing” on bestowed by our anthropocentric focus. And of these holes are faintly burnished black, as creator of Waanyi Country, that slinking her canvases to tread the colour in. yet human impact on the planet is undeniable. if they had imploded outwards, their bodies rainbow serpent whose gigantic presence In standing stone, ochre net, spine, the It’s a paradox with which humanism has long wrinkled with wound-like crevasses. opens Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria: “The “spine” is based on the bunya leaf, reminding grappled: what it means to be both part of and Another variation, Hollowing Earth, ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm us of generational resilience within the artist’s severed from the ecologies we inhabit. features uranium glass bush bananas. Like clouds, came down from the stars, laden with family, as well as of the re-emergence of plants Scarce’s Cloud Chamber is one of a Nucleus, these yield a tactile, violent impression its own creative enormity […] The water fi lled and animals after bushfi re. Its dusky presence number of works about the nuclear tests – their trailing slender stalk-like tips seemingly the swirling tracks to form the mighty bending corresponds also with Scarce’s work, recalling the Australia permitted the British government to about to melt and run off the table. rivers spread across the vast plains of the Gulf shadows left by the atomic blast in Hiroshima, carry out in Maralinga during the 1950s and “Suppose I were to begin by saying country.” The fi lm boodjamulla wanami feels the one-dimensional life reliefs captured on ’60s. Glass yams – inert, calcifi ed – dangle that I had fallen in love with a color,” Maggie like an even more direct visualisation of this walls, like an impression left behind after closing from the ceiling, reminding the viewer of Nelson writes at the opening of Bluets, her scene, defi ned as much by sound as by image; your eyes to ward off a fl ash bulb’s glare. lakes of vitrifi ed sand and other eff ects of poetic meditation on the end of a relationship bird calls echo, asserting the presence of other • nuclear radiation, as well as the glass shards and the colour blue. Judy Watson needs no lives in the trees, and the staccato rhythms of Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie used to decorate the graves of the artist’s convincing: blue recurs throughout her work, water can be heard slapping the canoe’s body Scarce is at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, people at Koonibba Mission Station. The representative of salt water and matrilineage. as it fl oats along Lawn Hill Gorge. Victoria, until March 8.

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