Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park

Yhonnie Scarce is an artist known for sculptural installations which span architecturally-scaled public art projects to intimately-scaled assemblages replete with personal and cultural histories. Scarce is a master glass-blower, which she puts to the service of spectacular and spectral installations full of aesthetic, cultural and political significance. Her work also engages the photographic archive and found objects to explore the impact and legacies of colonial and family histories and memory. 

Yhonnie Scarce was born in Woomera, South Australia, in 1973, and belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples. Scarce’s work often references the ongoing effects of colonisation on Aboriginal people and country. Her research has explored the impact of nuclear testing, the displacement and relocation of Aboriginal people from their homelands, and the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Family history is central to Scarce’s work, drawing on the experience and strength of her ancestors, and sharing their significant stories from the past in the present. 

Scarce’s work also engages with the disciplinary forms of colonial institutions and representation—religion, ethnography, medical science, museology, taxonomy—as well as monumental and memorial forms of public art and remembrance. Her work is both autobiographical and ancestral, ensuring that her family are never forgotten or lost within the labyrinthine administration of the colonial archive.

Featuring a major new commission and drawing upon existing works over the past fifteen years, Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park has been developed by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in partnership with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, where the exhibition will be presented from July 17 to September 18. 

Curators: Lisa Waup, Max Delany and Liz Nowell

Associated events:

The exhibition opening will be held from 2pm on Saturday, March 27, and officially launched with a smoking ceremony in the Ngargee Courtyard at ACCA at 2:30pm.

A keynote conversation will be held on Monday, March 29 from 6–7pm between Yhonnie Scarce and Daniel Browning, Indigenous journalist, broadcaster, documentary maker, and longtime presenter of ABC Radio National’s Awaye! program.

Yhonnie Scarce and exhibition curators Lisa Waup and Max Delany will be in discussion from 3–4pm on Saturday, April 17, focussing on the new commission, and wider cultural histories related to the impacts of nuclear testing on the land and communities in South Australia, and the role of glass and memory in relation to family and colonial histories.

Lisa Waup and Max Delany will conduct an in-depth tour of the exhibition at 3pm on Saturday, May 15.

Further information about ACCA’s public programs and bookings available at acca.melbourne.