Yhonnie Scarce

Yhonnie Scarce (Pronounced "you-ah-nee".) She is of the Kothatha people of the Lake Eyre region (north of Woomera) and Nukunu people of the southern Eyre Peninsula

After leaving school, Scarce worked first in administration at the University of Adelaide, then as a trainee at the Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute in the visual arts department. While doing office work at the Centre for Australian Indigenous Research and Studies at the University of Adelaide in 2001, she enrolled in a Bachelor of Visual Art at the University of South Australia, majoring in glass-blowing with a minor in painting. She graduated in 2003 as the first Aboriginal student to graduate from the University of Adelaide with a major in Glass, and was on the Dean's Merit Award List. She is influenced by the qualities of glass as a medium and uses her work to address Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues including genocide, racism, environmental degradation and intergenerational trauma. Created from more than 2,000 hand-blown glass yams, it references the impact of the nuclear tests on local Aboriginal communities, between 1955 and 1963.

Remember Royalty (2018) features glass yams along with glass bush plums, in cases in front of photographs of the artist's family.

In preparation for her work at the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, In the Dead House, she examined the practices of "body-shoppers", who traded in whole or parts of dead bodies. The installation is mounted in the building formerly used as a morgue and later the Parkside Lunatic Asylum in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, now in the Adelaide Botanic Garden. Scottish physician William Ramsay Smith, who practised medicine at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in the early 1900s and used to sell body parts to international buyers, obtained some of his material from the morgue. Scarce also found that the practice of trading body parts continues today on the dark web, despite the advances in medical ethics, human rights and cultural heritage law and practices (including around the repatriation of human remains).

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Scarce had been spending some time at the University of Birmingham researching Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, the scientists who worked on developing nuclear bomb technology. She is planning to return to this in order to develop another artwork as a follow-up to Thunder Raining Poison.

Academia she is on the staff of the Centre of Visual Art, Victorian College of the Arts.

Awards and recognition In 2008 Scarce was the inaugural South Australian recipient of the Qantas Foundation Encouragement Award. Art Gallery of South Australia: Burial ground (2011); What they wanted (2007) Art Gallery of Western Australia; Blood on the wattle (2013); The Near Breeder (2022) National Gallery of Australia: Cultivation of Whiteness (2013); Silence part 1, part 2 (2014); Thunder Raining Poison (2015); Glass Bomb (Blue Danube) Series I, II, III (2015) National Gallery Victoria:The Collected (2010); Blood on the wattle (Elliston, South Australia 1849) (2013); Oppression, repression (family portrait) (2004)

Exhibitions 2004 Scarce's first solo exhibition was held at BANK Gallery at the University of South Australia 2007 Artspace, Adelaide Festival Centre 2008 Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide 2020: Featured in Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, which is titled "Monster Theatres". 2020–2021 Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce at the TarraWarra Museum of Art in Victoria. Curated by Hetti Perkins, the exhibition featuring the work of Judy Watson and Scarce was scheduled to be shown at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, but owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was rearranged to stay home.

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