Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce by twmuseum

C U R AT E D B Y H E T T I P E R K I N S

TarraWarra Museum of Art, NETS Victoria, the artists and the curator of Looking Glass respectfully acknowledge and celebrate the continuing culture and custodianship of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on whose lands this exhibition is presented and all communities across Australia.

CONTENTS

TARRAWARRA MUSEUM OF ART FOREWORD by Victoria Lynn

NETS VICTORIA FOREWORD by Myles Russell-Cook

LOOKING GLASS: JUDY WATSON AND YHONNIE SCARCE by Hetti Perkins

HEARTSTRING – Judy Watson in conversation with Hetti Perkins

CLOUD CHAMBER – Yhonnie Scarce in conversation with Hetti Perkins

LIST OF WORKS 94 BIOGRAPHIES 98 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 100

TARRAWARRA MUSEUM OF ART FOREWORD

RRAWARRA MUSEUM OF ART OREWORD

Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce has arisen from an invitation to TarraWarra Museum of Art from Jonathan Watkins, Director, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, to collaborate on an exhibition of leading contemporary Aboriginal artists. We invited Arrernte and Kalkadoon curator Hetti Perkins to be the curatorial advisor for the project and she proposed Waanyi artist Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce from the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples, two of Australia’s most lyrical, poignant and innovative artists. While the global pandemic has caused all manner of disruptions, this exhibition has evolved in some wondrous ways. Presented in partnership with The Balnaves Foundation, it will mark the reopening of the Museum after eight months of closure, providing our audiences with the much-anticipated experience of art, humanity and homage to Country. In March 2020, Ikon presented a suite of new works by Judy Watson, selected and installed by Hetti Perkins. A number of Watson’s works were made in response to visits she undertook to see English, Scottish and Irish sites of prehistorical significance—including standing stones, circles and hill figures at Stonehenge, Avebury, the Outer Hebrides and Orkney—as well as visits to The British Museum and The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Watson’s work was presented at Ikon in a global context, with exhibitions by British artist John Newling, and Italian artist Mariateresa Sartori, being concurrently exhibited. Yhonnie Scarce was in Birmingham to undertake a residency and produce a new work for Ikon which was to mark the mid-point of these three shows. While these well laid plans were cut short by COVID-19, Watson’s exhibition re-opened in Ikon in August 2020, and Scarce will return there after the pandemic to complete her research into Birmingham’s history as a centre of glass manufacture and the place where scientific calculations that led to the development of the atom bomb were conducted during World War II.

Over the summer of 2020–2021, TarraWarra Museum of Art presents an expanded version of the exhibition, curated by Hetti Perkins. Watson’s paintings, installations and videos have returned from Ikon and are combined at TarraWarra with earlier works from leading private and public collections. Informed by the artist’s long-standing exploration of the threads of Aboriginal survival in the face of colonisation, many of the works on display are painted in various iterations of the colour blue, such as indigo, ultramarine, cobalt and turquoise. Referred to as ‘the colour of memory’ by the artist, these paintings hover with a liquid energy that brings the flow of Aboriginal culture to the surface. Scarce’s works in this exhibition date from 2015 to 2020 and draw on the impact of the British nuclear tests in Maralinga, South Australia, between 1956 and 1963. Maralinga is the home of the Maralinga Tjarutja, a southern Pitjantjatjara people, who were devastated by these toxic blasts. At Woomera, in the South Australian desert, the place of Scarce’s birth, the British tested the missiles that could carry the bombs. Scarce’s glass installations refer to the many deaths of Aboriginal people, the crystallisation of the desert sand through the blasts, and the long-term effects of the testing on natural flora, fauna and terrain. Watson and Scarce’s Aboriginal histories underpin their unique yet interrelated evocation of the metaphors of earth, fire, water and air. Summoned by the artists, these elements express the pain of Aboriginal people and the poisoning of the land. Yet the extraordinary luminescence of their works provides us with a deeply felt sense of resilience and survival. Watson and Scarce’s poignant works are united by translucent and porous surfaces that reveal layers of history, unearthed as it were, as enduring images of our collective memories. They remind us that when we look through glass, we not only see what lies beyond, but also a reflection of ourselves.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the artists Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce and the curator Hetti Perkins for creating this magical exhibition and for their patience with our bumpy journey through the pandemic. I also thank Jonathan Watkins, Director of Ikon, and his colleagues, Melanie Pocock, Thomas Ellmer, Linzi Stauvers and Rebecca Small for their initial invitation to us, and for their loyal commitment to the project. This exhibition would not have been possible without the generous support of our Major Exhibition Partner The Balnaves Foundation, and I thank Hamish Balnaves, Neil and Diana Balnaves, and their fellow Trustees for their continued support of the Museum. Beyond this summer season at the Museum, a significant tour of Looking Glass organised by NETS Victoria will be shown at venues across Australia. NETS also provided important support for the development of the exhibition and we thank them for their partnership, in particular Claire Watson, Director, and Shae Nagorcka, Exhibition Coordinator. I also acknowledge the generous lenders to the exhibition, Bank Art Museum Moree Collection, Monash University Collection, courtesy of Monash University Museum of Art, National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, RMIT University Art Collection, Collection of The University of Queensland and the anonymous private lenders.

TarraWarra Museum of Art acknowledges and thanks our founding patrons, Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC for their remarkable gift of the Museum and its collection; the Inaugural Foundation Supporter: the Besen Family Foundation; the TarraWarra Museum of Art Foundation; the Board of TarraWarra Museum of Art; the major sponsors: Arnold Bloch Leibler Lawyers and Advisers, Probuild, Deloitte Private, Chubb Insurance Australia and AON; our major partners: Paoli Smith Creative, IAS Fine Art Logistics and RACV Club; and our education program supporters: the Ullmer Family Foundation, the Scanlon Foundation, Escala Partners, Credit Suisse, the Bennelong Foundation, and The Erdi Foundation. Finally, I extend my thanks to all the staff and volunteers at the Museum for their commitment to the Museum, and for their support and enthusiasm for Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce. Victoria Lynn Director

We are deeply grateful to the artists’ agents Josh Milani at Milani Gallery Brisbane; Dianne Tanzer and Nicola Stein, at THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne and Jan Minchin at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. We would also like to extend our thanks to Probuild for their generous support, particularly Rose Fleming and John Feehan who managed and supervised the installation of the grid in the ceiling of the North Gallery of the Museum.

NETS VICTORIA FOREWORD

As the first partnership between National Exhibitions Touring Support (NETS) Victoria and TarraWarra Museum of Art, Looking Glass is an important exhibition that provides an opportunity to celebrate two of Australia’s boldest and most acclaimed contemporary artists — Brisbane-based Waanyi artist, Judy Watson, and Melbourne-based Kokatha and Nukunu artist, Yhonnie Scarce. Both Scarce and Watson explore Australia’s deeply unsettling history of colonisation and the ongoing impact of European settlement on Culture and Country. Featuring newly commissioned installations as well as a body of pre-existing work from both artists, Looking Glass represents a significant engagement between TarraWarra Museum of Art and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. The exhibition is a testament to the important work of both artists as well as the work of Arrernte and Kalkadoon curator and writer, Hetti Perkins. Looking Glass is a timely exhibition which tackles complex subject matter in a sensitive and thought-provoking way. For NETS Victoria, Looking Glass demonstrates the organisation’s commitment to collaboration and supporting First Nations creative practice throughout Australia. NETS Victoria is the peak body for touring visual art, craft and design across Victoria and beyond; partnering and collaborating with art galleries, cultural institutions, artists and curators to present outstanding exhibitions and projects, complemented by high quality publications and programs. NETS Victoria is both proud and excited to be giving regional and metropolitan audiences across Australia access to the important works of these two exciting, contemporary artists. I strongly believe in this project’s potential to provide a transformative experience for people through the power of art. By touring this exhibition, NETS Victoria has enabled the exceptional work of TarraWarra Museum of Art, our exhibition partner, to reach audiences across Australia. The audiences reached through touring Looking Glass will be vast and the depth of their engagement will be significant.

On behalf of NETS Victoria, I would like to thank and pay tribute to the remarkable agility of our partner TarraWarra Museum of Art led by Director Victoria Lynn, working closely with Exhibitions Manager Michelle Mountain and Curator Anthony Fitzpatrick. I likewise congratulate the Curator Hetti Perkins and the artists Yhonnie Scarce and Judy Watson, whose unique creative visions support new reflections, inspiring us to question, reimagine and explore, societal and historical truths. We acknowledge Ikon Gallery, Birmingham for their tireless work alongside TarraWarra Museum of Art as exhibition planner and the Balnaves Foundation for their ongoing support of TarraWarra Museum of Art and as Major Exhibition Partner for Looking Glass. Special thanks to Creative Victoria for their support of the exhibition tour and its development through the Exhibition Development Fund; the Gordon Darling Foundation for their support of the exhibition catalogue; the Australian Cultural Fund and the individuals who significantly donated to the fundraiser in support of the exhibition tour, particularly Carolyn Crossley, as well as all of NETS Victoria’s touring partners and supporting organisations who have made this tour possible. Understanding the history of place is of the utmost importance in the work of both Yhonnie Scarce and Judy Watson. In differing ways, their practices demonstrate an unwavering and deeply personal connection to the land. It is my hope that audiences across Australia will leave this exhibition with a deeper understanding as to the depth, resilience and significance of Aboriginal custodianship of Country. Myles Russell-Cook Curator, Indigenous Art | National Gallery of Victoria Member of NETS Victoria’s Artistic Program Advisory Committee

Yhonnie Scarce Nucleus (U235) (3) 2020

Let no one say the past is dead. The past is all about us and within. Haunted by tribal memories, I know This little now, this accidental present Is not the all of me, whose long making Is so much of the past.1 At its heart, this exhibition of works by Waanyi artist Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce from the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples, is simultaneously a love song and a lament for Country; a fantastical alchemy of elemental materiality: of earth, water, fire and air. Watson’s ochres, charcoal and pigments, pooled and washed upon flayed linens, have a natural affinity and synergy with Scarce’s fusions of fire, earth and air. In their paintings, installations and films, Watson and Scarce express the inextricable ‘one-ness’ of Aboriginal people with Country, a familial relationship established for millennia. Celebrated activist and poet, the late Oodgeroo Noonuccal from Minjerribah wrote ‘The Past’ to ‘tell everyone in the world who I am, what I am and why I am what I am’.2 So too, Looking Glass draws on the autobiographical to extrapolate a collective Aboriginal history that precedes and informs the ‘accidental present’ of Australia today. Together Watson and Scarce offer a panoptic and holistic portrait of Country where the creation and experience of art is mnemonic for the inherited, remembered and lived history of Aboriginal people.

Yet, while their works often refer to specific events, their enigmatic and often intimate forms, gestures and marks also imply an immersive timelessness outside of a linear chronology; an existence today that is more than the ‘now’. Colloquially, this is often referred to as the Dreaming to imply an ‘extraconsciousness’, an extraordinary perception of the connection of Country, community and culture. In 1953, the Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner wrote, ‘One cannot “ﬁx” The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen’.3 Curator Stephen Gilchrist of the Yamatji people of the Inggarda language group notes, that Stanner’s ‘poetic neologism was not necessarily offered to suggest a synonym for the Dreaming, but rather to provide that concept with nuance. Nonetheless, the term captures something elusive about the Dreaming’s approach to time — its singularity, sequentiality, and connectivity’.4 Or, to borrow from a scholarly interpretation of a metaphor in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass — for Aboriginal people there is never any jam today: The White Queen offers to hire Alice as her lady’s maid and to pay her “Twopence a week, and jam every other day.” Alice says that she doesn’t want any jam today, and the Queen tells her: “You couldn’t have it if you did want it. The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day.” This is a reference to the rule in Latin that the word iam or jam meaning now in the sense of already or at that time cannot be used to describe now in the present, which is nunc in Latin. Jam is therefore never available today.5

Judy Watson, spot fires, our country is burning now 2020

Through the works of Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce the viewer steps through the ‘looking glass’ of contemporary Australia to challenge its popularised reflection of a young, free and ‘lucky’ country, as immortalised in Dorothea Mackellar’s patriotic anthem or love song, ‘My Country’.6 It’s a version of Australia at odds with an Aboriginal sense of ‘homeland’ that exists outside of the accidental present and beyond short term gain. In After the Dreaming, his series of Boyer Lectures in 1968, Stanner observed that ‘No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland ... Our term ‘land’ is too spare and meagre. We can scarcely use it except without economic overtones unless we happen to be poets’.7 In their art, Watson and Scarce expose this ‘big picture’ — this meagre, unimaginative and abusive relationship to ‘land’ — peeling back the thin disguise of nationalist clichés to expose the short-sightedness of the rapacious exploitation of Country for a quick profit — for ‘jam’ today. Curiously, the Carroll allusion has further, unintended significance for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people when read by a member of our community. In our eyes, it alludes to the indentured servitude for little or no wages of lost — or stolen — children, as well as the deceitful bartering of rations, the withholding of rations and the poisoning of rations. More broadly, Alice’s encounters in an alien world resonate within the context of our frontier history as a story of powerlessness within a new, strange and often merciless world. The experiences of Watson’s matrilineal ancestors at the hands of white ‘kings’ and ‘queens’ in the pastoral industry are a continuous theme in her art. While the ochred surfaces of her paintings in Looking Glass literally evoke her Country, the ubiquitous hues of blue in her paintings and works on paper are a metaphor for memory: I listen and hear those words a hundred years away That is my Grandmother’s Mother’s Country it seeps down through blood and memory and soaks into the ground.8

Watson’s ‘long making’ draws on the ‘memory’ of her matrilineal heritage rooted in the country of Boodjamulla and patrilineal northern European ancestry. In exploring the landscape of her father’s people for the commissioned works in this exhibition, she literally drew a metaphor of string, a corporeal, umbilical connection, the strands of which are fused into the artist’s DNA. The film work invasion, 2020, documents the travels of the artist and her family to England, Ireland and Scotland in 2019, overlaid with a string object sourced from the Gulf of Carpentaria held in the collection of Cambridge University. The monolithic and standing stone arrangements documented and diarised during her journey appear in her paintings imbued with an otherworldly presence inferring their sacredness. In these works, Watson drapes these sentinel forms with icons reminiscent of home — grevillea, kangaroo grass and gumbi gumbi. The seductive beauty of Watson’s paintings and Scarce’s installations belies a powerful message — drawing us into their ‘tender trap’. Watson and Scarce, like all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, share recent and personally painful histories of the destruction, exploitation and degradation of not only the land, but the people of the land. Watson’s spot fires, our country is burning now, 2020 is chillingly reminiscent of the satellite images of Australia’s eastern coast during the cataclysmic bushfires in the Australian summer of 2019–20, while Scarce’s ectoplasmic yam forms in her lethal atomic cloud cast ghostly shadows, becoming a vast memento mori, warning of the dangers and consequences of warmongering and environmental destruction. Essentially, this exhibition is about Australia’s secret and dirty war — a battle fought on many fronts from colonial massacres to Stolen Generations, from the Maralinga atomic bomb tests to the climate emergency. Watson’s and Scarce’s aesthetic arias of love and lament bring to mind the dystopia of TS Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917). This ‘love song’, written in a time of rapidly accelerating industrialisation and technological experimentation which peaked

during the mid-20th century atomic age, is a creepy and prescient invocation of an apocalyptic world where innocents asleep in their beds are encroached upon by a lurking menace, a poisonous fog. In the post-apocalyptic Maralinga landscape, the innocents rest uneasily in their graves, photographed by Scarce at the Woomera Cemetery, as do the countless others who vanished in the desert lands of the test sites. Scarce juxtaposes over-scaled, starkly rendered images of the cemetery against the fragility of the glass forms resting in laboratory-like cribs. The ‘black mist’ (radioactive fallout) did not spare the white workers at the Woomera weapons base who were used as guinea pigs in the tests, or their children. For those Aboriginal people living on the lands and surrounding areas who survived the successive bombs, the fallout brought a plague upon their families and descendants. Scarce memorialises our people in Cloud Chamber, 2020, an installation of many hundreds of anthropomorphic glass yams that comprise a mushroom cloud formation, mimicking that created by the Breakaway atomic test, the final one in the series. Eerily, the use of glass within Scarce’s installations echo not only the vast ‘lakes’ of vitrified sand caused by the blast, but also the glass shards used to decorate the graves of her people at the Koonibba Mission Station. In Looking Glass, Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce poignantly remind us how the pursuit of the Great Australian Dream is not what it seems. It is, in reality, a nightmare, a shimmering mirage, a candle in the coming storm.

Excerpt from ‘The Past’ by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, first published in 1964, published in Kevin Gilbert (ed.), Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry, Melbourne: Penguin Books Australia Ltd., 1988, p. 99.

Quoted in Ellen van Neerven, ‘Oodgeroo Noonuccal: Poems’, URL: https://readingaustralia.com.au/essays/oodgeroo-noonuccal-poems, accessed 23 September 2020.

WEH Stanner, ‘The Dreaming’ in White Man Got No Dreaming, Essays, 1938–1973, Canberra and Norwalk, Conn.: Australian National University Press/Books Australia, 1979, p. 24.

Stephen Gilchrist, ‘Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia’ in Stephen Gilchrist (ed.), Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, (exh. cat.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2016, p. 19.

Eleanor Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 163.

Dorothea Mackellar, ‘My Country’, first published in the London Spectator in 1908 titled as ‘Core of My Heart’. It reappeared several times in Australia before being published as ‘My Country’ in her first book, The Closed Door and Other Verses, Melbourne, 1911.

WEH Stanner quoted in Mick Dodson, ‘Foreword’ in Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett (eds.), An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008, p. v.

Judy Watson, artist statement, in Wiyana/Perisferia (Periphery), exhibition catalogue, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative at The Performance Space, Sydney, 1992, not paginated.

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917) in T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909–1962, London and Boston: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1963, p. 13.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.9

HEARTSTRING

Judy Watson in conversation with Hetti Perkins

HP String is a recurring motif or reference in your works and, as Geraldine Barlow observes, when ‘one fibre joins another; fragile threads are made stronger when entwined. Women are traditionally the string-makers. Fibres are rolled up and down the leg to bind them together, with the small hairs being picked up and becoming a part of the string.’1 It seems that this is also a way of understanding your artistic practice, and how your own personal story becomes part of your family’s history. JW String is not just vegetable fibre, it could be hair from the body. It can be material fibre that has been worn on the body. It collects all the DNA from the hair of the person who’s making the string — rolling it up and down on their leg and capturing the hairs and particles of skin — and then from whoever wears those hairstring objects. Whether it goes into a museum collection or somewhere else, it’s gathering all that community with it. It’s like the old people are travelling in those objects. The DNA of those people, their resonance, is still in the object. You can feel it when you look at it or when you touch it. The first thing I thought when I saw some of those objects was, could that have been my grandmother’s, great grandmother’s, great great grandmother’s hair within those objects? And further back, my great great grandfather as well. HP It’s interesting, as Geraldine also observes, that the structure of the string echoes the double helix of the DNA pattern.2 The string metaphor leads us to talking about the process of creating the exhibition for Ikon and subsequently TarraWarra Museum of Art and the Australian tour. JW I’m creating a work right now for the Gallery of Modern Art | Queensland Art Gallery Water exhibition which has string in it and whorls of water.

HP I remember being very struck by a work you did where you referred to the whorls made by the hairs on the head of a newborn baby and, in more recent works, how those patterns can refer to melting snow. It’s one of the characteristics of your work, the simultaneous expression of the ‘big picture’ and the ‘small picture’. A deeply personal, observational practice. During your recent visits to England, Scotland and Ireland, what sort of ‘string’ have you been making? What have you been gathering and binding together? JW The conceptual idea underlying the trip was looking at ancient sites in the region, specifically stone sites: stone circles or standing stones. I also revisited The British Museum and The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. My idea was to have images of standing stone forms — shadowy or very ghostly presences — and the floating of Aboriginal cultural material across the top. It’s a layering of experiences and a layering of understanding of what is culture. I took photos and video of the stone sites, but also of people interacting with them as something familiar in their ‘backyard’. You get people picnicking on them, leaning against them, sheep rubbing against them and leaving the dye-print of their wool on the stones. People would come to them, interact with them, photograph themselves, and then the next wave of people would come through. It’s very different to many of our sites in Australia, like Boodjamulla (Lawn Hill Gorge) in north-west Queensland. There are sites there that are really important, that you are not allowed to photograph any more. That’s come about through the community making that decision because it’s part of a living culture. Whereas with the English sites, they’re very much part of the tourist landscape — and very young in comparison to Australian sites. And then there’s my collective memory in terms of my mum’s Aboriginal side of the family. And dad’s side, the Scottish,

English and Irish side, as well. Thinking about that coming down the line of generations and how all of that cultural memory comes into a collective space which is myself, my body as the artist. I’m then transmitting this data in the same way as all the data and DNA that’s been collected by the Aboriginal cultural material. Sometimes those objects have been in overseas museums longer than they were in their own country, even though the cultural memory is much, much older in the place where they were made. It’s really important if they can be repatriated and seen by people from those communities. I’m interested in all of those stories and the way they rub up against each other, like string. For example, I was looking at some woven objects in Cambridge a few years ago and, when I unpacked them, I couldn’t believe there were thirteen or so hairstring skirts. I thought why are there thirteen? There were small ones, and large ones. How did whoever collected these get them? Did they ask the women and the young girls to suddenly drop them and take them? Were they collected after a massacre? Were they given in exchange for mission dresses? Were they exchanged for money or other goods? To have that number from a community of thirteen young girls and older women, it made me very sad actually. HP All objects have a degree of cultural intimacy but certainly those objects are especially personal, intimate objects considering their role in community life. JW Absolutely, they have been taken from the body. And there’s something those objects are transmitting to you. I was trying to enfold them and understand them and I feel like they were part of that exchange as well, that exchange of information. How do they feel, having been taken from their place of origin and from the people who wore them, into the dark spaces in museums?

JW Gaye Sculthorpe sent me links to all of this information and it’s really interesting.3 There was a person whose name was Agnes Dorothy Kerr (c. 1870–1951) who was the Matron of Burketown Hospital, Queensland. Basically, she was a bone collector. Of course she wasn’t the only one, there were plenty of people doing that type of thing. She was colluding with various curators to get all of this material for the Wellcome Collection in London — a different life from being the Matron of a hospital. For instance, Kerr donated the skull and breastplate of ‘King Tiger of Lawn Hill Mines’. King Tiger’s skull has gone back to the National Museum of Australia and the Waanyi authorities are going to decide where it should be reburied, but the breastplate is still at the Wellcome Collection. HP I wonder if she bequeathed her own skeleton to the Collection … JW It’s bizarre. All this correspondence stopped when the war broke out. It’s very much a case of skulduggery. People say to her that they know that people don’t want to have their bones taken. And yet, she and others talk about doing it by stealth. With all of this correspondence, it would be great to do an artist’s book in the same way I did a preponderance of aboriginal blood (2005) and under the act (2007). HP We, as Aboriginal people, talk about the ongoing effects of colonisation and the evidence of that through state sanctioned actions like the atomic testing at Maralinga and the Stolen Generations. Also the actions of people like Kerr speak volumes about what colonialism is about and the relationship between subject and oppressor which enables activities like hers. When you go into those collections you don’t know what you will find.

HP Your work about the trafficking of objects includes breastplates or gorgets, and even human remains.

JW At Cambridge, they’ve changed their practice because they were letting me handle objects with my bare hands. Previously you had to wear gloves and sometimes that is for good reason as there might be arsenic or formaldehyde or whatever they used to preserve objects — you probably don’t want that on your skin — but not when it’s stone tools and things. HP It makes sense if it’s people from the community of origin to not wear gloves because you’re putting your DNA on that object. JW Māori people talk about the fact that the pounamu (jade) needs that human touch or embrace and crying over to be kept alive. I think it’s the same with other cultural material. HP You’ve said in drawing the works, you literally draw them to you. JW In looking at those drawings later, I can remember doing the drawing. I know I remember the object much more because of that transmission of the eye down the line of the arm to the pencil on the paper. So, even if I was to touch that drawing, it would shoot back a strong memory flash of the object and so I really like going back to those early drawings and thinking about them. It’s like a cry from the object to me and back again, we’re talking to each other, it’s a conversation. HP And how did you feel when you were looking at those different stone formations and other sites like the henges, the barrows, the ley lines in your travels? JW I was interested in how I would feel in those places. And, the same as you would find in many sites in Australia, every time I think this is a great place to sit and look at the view, it’s really safe — that’s where you often find stone tools and midden sites. Often the sites for the ancient standing stones and stone circles were very similar and very beautiful. I had the chance to sit, do a bit of drawing, photography and filming, and really just be in the place.

It was a really good matrix for my journey across the country to places as far north as the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, and a few sites in Ireland. HP It’s interesting to think of England from an Aboriginal perspective, of the coloniser’s country being crisscrossed with significant and enduring signs of spirituality. JW I’ve always been interested in ancient sites where there’s water, springs, ancient sources. During a residency in Italy, I met some people who were looking at magnetic sites around the world when I was at this site near Castellina in Chianti. We were talking about the fact that later churches were built on pagan sites and about our trade routes or ‘highways’ that went through Aboriginal Australia going from well to well, connecting water sources — they were talking about it in a European context. After they left, I was standing where there was an Etruscan tomb and it had two Tuscan pines planted on it — they were used as markers — and an incredible storm came across but, between the pines, it was really still. It was very potent. At the Ness of Brodgar on the Orkney Islands, I met archaeologists who were working on a dig and saying how they wanted to get to the really old sites. In Australia and other places too, that’s the history I’m really interested in as well as contemporary history. I really want to know what comes first and then come up through the levels gradually. HP Your process of research reflects the making of the work itself, applying all the layers and then rubbing it back to see what is revealed. And layering your very delicate mark making. And even the ground underneath the work makes an impression on this flayed skin that is your canvas. JW I will have ideas set in my head about what I want to do and I’ve got all the collected material but then the work has a conversation with me. I’ll try and push forward and it’ll push back and so it will

really be what will transpire once I engage with the work and the work tells me what to do! It’s got to feel right in my gut and that’s why some things take a long time. I did a trip back to our Waanyi country last year that will also translate across into the work I’m making: Boodjamulla, Riversleigh, connections with my grandmother’s story, my mother’s, my great great grandmother’s. HP How do you feel when you’re on Country? JW Fantastic, it is such a beautiful experience to be there, but also our country is so incredible. The subterranean blue-green water, the verdant palms, all the wildlife in the area, the bush birds, the animals. This time I was noticing a lot of scar trees and photographing those. It’s dried up a bit as it has everywhere. Century Zinc has taken a lot of the water, and drought and climate change have come to bear in those areas as well. There are so many sites across the Gulf of Carpentaria that used to have beautiful springs running in the 1800s and 80% of them are no longer working due to interference by people and animal stock and other causes. There was a story about Lilydale Springs where my grandmother — my grandmother Grace Isaacson or Camp as she was known previously — used to go when she was little. She asked her mother, Mabel Daly, ‘how are Lilydale Springs?’ when she saw her again, and her mother Mabel said ‘Oh, the Rainbow [Rainbow Serpent, or Boodjamulla] dried it up’. They found out a person on the property had actually dynamited the springs trying to get more out of them. And that is just such a common story where there’s interference. It is such a delicate balance of that water bubbling from ancient sources up through the limestone, sandstone, all those layers to reach the top surface. It’s the same water that dinosaurs were drinking from. It’s connected underground to systems a long way away and to have that balance struck down for some futile short term gain, which they are definitely going to lose, is such a common story not just in Australia but across the world. It’s irreversible.

I’m making work about water as a weapon. I heard a lecture by Lisa Beaven about how water was redirected to surround towns in Europe to push a whole community into submission.4 That is exactly what’s happening with the Murray-Darling where water has been re-routed and it’s making communities die. The water’s not sustaining country and therefore it’s not sustaining the culture and the people — and that’s deliberate genocide. It’s water as a weapon. During frontier violence, many of our waterholes were deliberately poisoned. Now many of our river systems and bodies of water are poisoned by agricultural, domestic and industrial contaminants leaching into them. HP Speaking about weapons, what is your interest in the manufacture of firearms in Birmingham? JW In the work pale slaughter, 2015, I was looking at the use of weapons in massacres and a list of weapons that were imported into Fremantle during the colonial era. I’m interested in which ones might have originated in Birmingham and also things like buttons on the Native Police uniforms, badges, belt buckles. There are so many different overlays of stories between Birmingham and the whole process of colonisation in Australia. HP How does the history of colonisation relate to your family in particular? JW Nan said that she started working from the age of five or six, when she was taken to Morestone Station from Thorntonia. Her mother, Mabel Daly, had run away with Nanna from Riversleigh Station. The police were coming and taking children away. Mrs Donaldson, who was the manager’s wife on the property, used to warn the women so they would hide the children. Nanna remembers being hidden on a number of occasions, but she ended up being taken to Morestone Station. Apparently the lady there wanted a little girl to teach how to work and that’s what Nanna did from five or six, until she then went to the next property.

HP As a ward of the state? JW Yes, and her mother too, Mabel Daly, she worked on a lot of properties and Rosie [the artist’s great great grandmother]. Rosie escaped a massacre at Lawn Hill and that was told to me by Ruby Saltmere and Shirley Macnamara, who are our relatives, at my grandmother’s funeral. I then read about it in Tony Robert’s book Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900 and it comes up again in Timothy Bottoms’s book Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing-Times. And somehow, a bit like the drawings, hearing about it at my grandmother’s funeral and then reading the story later, suddenly it pierced me. And that’s when I made salt in the wound, 2008, with Yhonnie Scarce; casting people’s ears with beeswax and making a windbreak like the one my great great grandmother hid behind.5 It’s a very fragile thing, it’s hardly a barrier. Rosie was bayonetted through the upper body. And then she and another girl used reeds to breathe through while they hid underwater with stones on their bellies to escape the troopers. Once again, such a fragile thing. Who would have thought that just a reed would be your passport to survival, something to breathe through to evade the murderous intents of the police and people from the surrounding properties — anyone who considered the blacks a nuisance. HP Much of our culture and history is passed to us orally or visually, often through art. JW I’ve always responded to stories, I was studying literature while I was studying visual art. The visualisation of a story has always been very much part of me.

Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, ‘Judy Watson’, Water, exhibition catalogue, Brisbane: Gallery of Modern Art | Queensland Art Gallery 2019, p. 113.

Ibid., p. 113.

Dr Gaye Sculthorpe is Curator & Section Head, Oceania, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, The British Museum

Lisa Beaven, ‘Weather, land and landscape: Landscape painting and the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century’, paper delivered at AFTERSTORM: Gardens, Art and Conflict symposium, University of Melbourne, 25 October 2019.

Judy Watson, salt in the wound 2008, ochre, salt, brush, wax, wire, nails, string, dimensions variable. Exhibited in Shards: Judy Watson, Yhonnie Scarce, Nici Cumpston, South Australian School of Art Gallery (SASA), 30 September – 24 October 2008.

JUDY WATSON

standing stone, kangaroo grass, red and yellow ochre 2020 OPPOSITE: standing stone, kangaroo grass, bush string 2020

standing stone, ochre net, spine 2020 OPPOSITE: standing stones, gumbi gumbi, stone tool 2020

standing stone, open cut ground 2020 OPPOSITE: standing stones, ashes to ashes 2020

standing stone, grevillea 2020 OPPOSITE: standing stone with spines 2020

pituri bags 2020 OPPOSITE: dugong bones 2020

passage of light and air 2020

two moons, trooper’s buttons 2020 OPPOSITE: standing stones with sutures on indigo 2020

resistance 2020 OPPOSITE: resistance pins 2020

resistance pins 2018

40 pairs of blackfellows’ ears, lawn hill station part of salt in the wound 2008

the witness tree 2018 (video stills)

boodjamulla wanami 2019 (video stills)

invasion 2020 (video stills)

passing from the edge of memory to the night sky 2007

waterline 2001 OPPOSITE: a complicated fall 2007

grandmother’s song 2007 OPPOSITE: two halves with bailer shell 2002

bunya 2011 OPPOSITE: proclamation 2011

blue notes 2019–20

CLOUD CHAMBER

Yhonnie Scarce in conversation with Hetti Perkins

‘A cloud chamber makes the invisible visible’1 HP Your ongoing project in collaboration with Lisa Radford, The Image is Not Nothing (Concrete Archives) (2019–ongoing), aims to ‘experience the physicality of loss and how it has been built into brutalist monuments that commemorate genocide and/or nuclear destruction,’ and asks: is the representation of large-scale and unacknowledged violence too large to depict?2 I don’t know if you have an answer to that, or if you ever will, or even intend to. YS I’ve been researching memorials since I started my practice as an artist. I became more aware of the lack of acknowledgement of the frontier wars in Australia when I was in Berlin on a scholarship that enabled me to travel internationally to research genocide. I call it the ‘City of Memorials’ and what attracted me to that place is how open it is to acknowledging the Holocaust through memorials in many different forms. I decided to create memorials when I came back to Australia because there weren’t enough in the public realm. I wanted to create sites of significance that were in the form of an artwork. So, I made numerous burial grounds or works that are related to particular massacres, and they just grew bigger. I was drawn to the scale of Spomeniks, when they were built, the reasons why they were built, and where they are.3 I asked Lisa to come along with me because I’d been visiting sites like Auschwitz and Birkenau and Berlin off and on, and when you’re going to specific sites where people have died, I feel like it’s healthier emotionally for someone to accompany you. We went to the US and visited Wounded Knee at the Pine Ridge Reservation and that was really important because I’d known about that place since I was a teenager. We moved on to Yerevan in Armenia to visit a genocide memorial to Armenian people.

Then we flew to Ukraine because there’s a structure called the Halls of Parting (in Memory Park, Kiev) in the main cemetery, which is a crematorium made out of concrete. It’s like it has wings and has two chambers. While we were there, there was a funeral service and it was snowing in the middle of the day, heavy snow, minus 12 degrees. We went to Chernobyl and Pripyat, and then Georgia and Poland, and then on to Japan to visit Hiroshima. We visited the prefecture of Fukushima and the radioactive site. That’s a short version of a long story! HP You have said: It angers me that there is very little recognition of the massacres in Australia […] I want people to have a place to mourn the ancestors that we have lost during these events, and I want people who are unaware of these massacres to be aware that this is part of our history …4 YS Why doesn’t Australia have something as big as the War Memorial in Canberra or the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne which recognises the massacres of Aboriginal people? Why aren’t Aboriginal people shown that respect? Myall Creek and Appin have memorials, but I strongly believe that we need more and it’s not happening fast enough. There’s community recognition happening for the 1849 Waterloo Bay massacre in Elliston, South Australia, but there was resistance to using the term ‘massacre’. Why shouldn’t we? Mob fought for Country. And they were fighting to survive, they were being killed over a few sheep. I get upset about it and part of it comes from anger. I put this anger into my artwork, but I also express my love for the people who died in those circumstances. HP I think that as Indigenous people we carry around a reservoir of grief within us and there’s no place to mourn, as you’ve said.

Cloud Chamber 2020 (detail)

YS There’s some sites we can’t access because the land is privately owned and it’s not public knowledge where many massacres have happened, so you’ve just got to create another space for it. The more I travel around the more I find out about particular sites, or by spending time with family in Tjutjuna (Ceduna).5 There’s not a lot of documentation of massacres in South Australia and that is of concern. It usually means police are involved, so of course it’s not documented. That was the case with Waterloo Bay, it was documented that only a small number of people were forced off that cliff, but oral histories confirmed the death toll was far higher. In my works that are created for these mourning processes, the shadows that come off the glass represent those people who are not spoken for. My people are Kokatha and Nukunu. Kokatha are from central South Australia and Nukunu are from the lower part of the Flinders Ranges, near Port Augusta and Port Germein in South Australia. That’s my grandmother’s Country and Kokatha is my grandfather’s Country. Both are on my mother’s side and I was born in Woomera. The majority of my extended family, my grandfather’s sisters — my nannas — were living in Tjutjuna and my grandmother, Nanna Kit, is there at the moment. I’m pretty much related to the whole of Tjutjuna! I come from the desert that meets the sea. Tjutjuna is a small town that has a strong Aboriginal community. I’ve been spending a lot more time back there. The more I search for information, the more I uncover about South Australia in general and the history of Maralinga.6 They were shooting rockets from Woomera7 around the same time as they were testing in Maralinga, and sending planes to fly through the atomic clouds of the bombs. I was born in 1973, just over a decade after they stopped testing at Maralinga. There’s a history related to the mortality rate of children, not just white children,

in that area. There’s not enough documentation related to Aboriginal deaths during those nuclear tests, but there’s definite written documentation on stillborn babies and babies born with deformities in the area that’s still being uncovered. Woomera is still being used as a military base. The Woomera prohibited zone is my Country, but I’m not allowed to cross any borders because it’s overseen by the military. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time up there in the last few years, returning to reconnect with my birthplace. They have a ‘trophy park’, as I call it, where they have all their little planes, jet fighters, rockets, bombs, satellites … HP … whereas the only form of memorialisation of Maralinga and its fallout are those toxic dumps, they’re like burial mounds out on that Country. YS I call them tombs; they buried everything there. The Marcoo site was one of the biggest craters that they filled in. That area was littered with radioactive material that has been buried in the ground. There’s pits where they scraped the surface of the ground and then buried it and turned it into glass through a process of in situ vitrification to retain it and prevent it from seeping out. HP The warning signs around the area have the radioactive warning symbol and underneath it says ‘Ngura Wiya’. In desert languages, ngura can mean ‘home’ and wiya is ‘no’, so it translates to ‘no home’. YS You can’t camp there, you can’t cook there. I wouldn’t want to live there either. HP The burial mounds at Koonibba8 cemetery are decorated with shards of glass and your work in glass is obviously an echo of that; the idea of memorialisation — of mourning — being associated with glass.

YS The traditional owners — now that part of the test site has been handed back to them — want people to know what happened out there. There are information signs that have been placed in areas around ground zero, and there’s photos near the Breakaway site of where the ground turned to glass from the blasts. It looks like water. The land melted. You can see the fragments of glass that are left there now after the supposed ‘clean up’; the traces left behind. My extended family was still living at Koonibba when the bombs were being set off. There’s stories about the substances from those clouds coming down as far as Tjutjuna and nappies being burnt on the clothesline, skin rashes that people were being told was measles, and ongoing issues of cancer. It has a lot to do with where the clouds travelled: south and across to Woomera, and further depending on where the wind blew. HP The British nuclear tests were the subject of a Royal Commission in 1984–85 and a number of legal actions. Robert Menzies, then Prime Minister of Australia — a known Anglophile — didn’t consult with Cabinet. It’s such an indictment of a colonialist mentality and its disregard for the welfare of Indigenous people. I was reading about Marcus Oliphant, the Australian physicist, who was born in South Australia, and thinking about these parallel worlds. There’s your people and your extended family living throughout this region and, meanwhile, there’s this other world — the Cold War and the arms race. And, coincidentally, there’s Oliphant, who played a significant role in this at the University of Birmingham, where the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum was written in 1940. You’ll be undertaking a residency in Birmingham and showing your work at Ikon Gallery. YS It is interesting to reflect on my visit to Birmingham in May 2019 and how I ended up there. The University of Birmingham was where they discovered nuclear energy. And not long after that they tested one of the first bombs in the US with the Manhattan Project.

It seems serendipitous that this opportunity has arisen. I feel like I’m meant to be there to delve deeper. Those scientists knew it was dangerous and when you think about where they tested this in the US and Maralinga, there was no respect for humankind. And the urgency to rush it through to test at Maralinga, to supposedly remove Aboriginal people from the area. There wasn’t enough time, there were Aboriginal people all over the place. And, to this day, there are ongoing intergenerational health issues, kids are still being born with issues related to radioactive poisoning. I feel like I’ve been sent there. I remember reading about the University of Birmingham years ago. I used to work at the University of Adelaide in my twenties and worked not far from the Oliphant Building. There’s an uncanniness to this connection. HP It’s parallel worlds and thinking about how those worlds collide: the colonial world, the Aboriginal world and the spirit worlds. With the Memorandum, they knew what the damage would be and it’s chilling: ‘it will, for an instant, produce a temperature comparable to that of the interior of the sun’.9 And the Memorandum doesn’t mince words, it states that this will kill people, people who come into the area afterwards will be killed, people downwind will be killed. YS When you go out to Maralinga, you are told about the ‘guinea pigs’. You see where the people were sitting, waiting to be told to go out and roll around on the ground. They called them volunteers but they were military personnel. They were given orders. It’s very sinister. In Frank Walker’s book Maralinga: The Chilling Exposé of Our Secret Nuclear Shame and Betrayal of Our Troops and Country (2014), there’s talk of a mass grave of Aboriginal people out there somewhere — all the ones that have been unaccounted for, that disappeared. I think there are people who know, who are still alive. So many Aboriginal people died during that time, and in more recent times too. Maralinga is a site of mass genocide.

HP The disregard for military personnel leads you to understand the lack of regard for Aboriginal people. At that time, we weren’t even counted in the census.

HP There’s no going back once a desert well is gone. There’s places where the wells are now permanently off limits and, for desert people, the land becomes virtually uninhabitable.

YS Easily disposed of. No-one knew how many people were out there. Only community knew, and who was going to listen to them at that time?

In Australia we still have a secret or silent war. The arms race to make the super bomb happened in an era of paranoia and suspicion known as the Cold War. The Brutalism movement comes out of this era, it’s post-apocalyptic.

HP Cloud Chamber, 2020, is such a fitting evocation of the Maralinga disaster. One of the bombs they exploded was like the one dropped on Hiroshima. There’s been a war on our people that’s continuing well into the middle of the twentieth century. Aboriginal people are the victims of war crimes. YS They are. It was another way of eradicating, of killing off, Aboriginal people. And it was fast. People would have disintegrated. The Country there wants to speak, I feel. Areas where something horrible has happened retain that memory. HP Judy Watson talks about that when she writes: I listen and hear those words a hundred years away That is my Grandmother’s Mother’s Country it seeps down through blood and memory and soaks into the ground.10 Our Country is sentient, it’s our ancestors. The Wanampi (rainbow snake) is a big story at Maralinga. Then there are these recent stories. Those stories need to be heard by all Australians. YS Even though where they set those bombs off is not my Country, it was a catalyst for what happened to mine. My ancestors used Ooldea, which is now a railway siding that you cross as you drive into Maralinga. Ooldea is a water soak that my Kokatha ancestors used as a meeting place and, when the military moved in, that soak dried up. So my mob had to move on from there. A lot of places were desecrated.

YS What draws me to Brutalist architecture and monuments is because they look otherworldly; like bunkers, a military form — and they’re big. I believe that, with me being born at a military base, it’s in my blood, and I keep tracing back to that history — as well as my love of sci-fi. And that terminology ‘brutalist’ is what has drawn me to it too. Those Brutalist buildings were built during a time of great oppression, for example, for the people of the former Yugoslavia during the Soviet period. These massive structures enforce power and I’m trying to decipher it in some way. The monuments are in obscure places and a lot of them are situated on killing fields. At The Three Fists in Serbia (built in 1963), there was a really strong sense of death. A sense of the energy shifting. You get that same sense here [in Australia]. Nothing needs to be there physically, but you know when you’ve walked into a place and something’s not quite right. At the Breakaway site in Maralinga where the glass is, you can see how big that bomb was because the vegetation will never grow. It poisoned the country and the people who live there. In order for Country to be living, human beings need to be there. HP The natural landscape reflects the spiritual landscape. It’s become stunted — how do you heal that? You can dig pits and bury radioactive material, but how do you heal the spirit? That’s where art is so important, the intangible energy source that creates art has the capacity to heal. To return to the original question of whether your experience of violence — collective, personal — is too large to depict, it seems to me

that the work you’re doing probably will continue to be in-progress for a long time, a process of mourning and healing. YS There are always things to be told, there’s always stories that are waiting until they’re ready. Then they rise up. My mum always says they’re just floating around. HP That’s what struck me about the definition of a cloud chamber: ‘a cloud chamber makes the invisible visible’.11 I thought of your work, mushroom clouds and the black cloud from the atomic testing. Otto Frisch, one of the writers of the Memorandum, was working on the cloud chamber, a scientific device to display invisible tracks of ionising radiation. Cloud Chamber is cloud-like, comprising over 1000 floating anthropomorphic glass yams. Your glass bombs have a lightness, a transparency, all of those things that we associate with light, air and clouds. They are brought into being by this process of fire and human action; you literally breathe life into them. A cloud chamber grasps all these things floating around us that we can’t see and makes them visible to us. Your work is a cloud chamber both physically and metaphorically. YS The invisibility becomes apparent. When I was installing Death Zephyr (2017),12 one of the gallery lights was pointing directly through it and hit the back wall. There was this cloud of bodies hanging from nooses. I had to leave. It was en masse. It spread across the whole room. It was really confronting for me, even though I think about death all the time, but it was like this mob just appeared. It’s amazing how these old people come through and reveal their presence … HP … through the cloud chamber. It is otherworldly, parallel worlds colliding, again. YS I wonder if the old people will come with me to Birmingham. I’m sure they will.

Author not attributed, ‘Cloud chamber’, URL: https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/ accelerate/resources/demonstrations/cloud-chamber, accessed 1 November 2019.

Lisa Radford and Yhonnie Scarce, ‘The Image is Not Nothing (Concrete Archives) – Part 1’, Art and Australia, Issue Five (55.2): Brutalism, 2019, p. 88.

Spomeniks translates as ‘monuments’ in Serbo-Croatian. The term is commonly used to describe monuments which were built to commemorate Second World War battles sites in the area formerly known as Yugoslavia.

‘Yhonnie Scarce’, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, published September 2012, URL: https://kluge-ruhe.org/collaboration/yhonnie-scarce/, accessed 1 November 2019.

Ceduna is a town in South Australia located on the shores of Murat Bay on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula, 786 km northwest of South Australia’s capital, Adelaide.

Maralinga is in the remote western area of South Australia, covering approximately 3,300 km2.

The Woomera Range Complex is located in the north-west of South Australia, with the operational area of the Range encompassed by the ‘Woomera Prohibited Area’ (WPA). The range also includes the restricted airspace over the WPA. The entire Woomera test and evaluation capability is known as the ‘Woomera Range Complex’ (WRC). The WRC is comprised of both the Woomera Test Range (Air Force Test Ranges Squadron), Royal Australian Air Force Base Woomera (20SQN) and the Nurrungar Test Range. Woomera is 450 km north-west of Adelaide.

Koonibba Aboriginal Community is located on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, 800 km west of Adelaide and 40 km northwest of Ceduna.

Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, ‘The Frisch–Peierls Memorandum’ (1940), in Rudolf E. Peierls, Atomic Histories, New York: Springer Verlag New York, Inc., 1997, p. 187.

10 Judy Watson, artist statement, in Wiyana/Perisferia (Periphery), exhibition catalogue, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative at The Performance Space, Sydney, 1992, not paginated. 11

Author not attributed, ‘Cloud chamber’, URL: https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/accelerate/ resources/demonstrations/cloud-chamber, accessed 1 November 2019.

12 Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha/Nukunu peoples), Death Zephyr (2017), hand blown glass yams, nylon and steel armature, dimensions variable. Purchased with funds provided by the Aboriginal Collection Benefactor’s Group 2017, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

YHONNIE SCARCE

Cloud Chamber 2020

Cloud Chamber 2020 (detail)

Cloud Chamber 2020

Nucleus (U235) (1–3) 2020

Nucleus (U235) (4–5) 2020

Glass Bomb (Blue Danube) Series IV 2015

Only a mother could love them 2016

Only a mother could love them 2016 (detail)

Fallout Babies 2016

Fallout Babies 2016 (detail)

Hollowing Earth 2016–17 (detail)

Hollowing Earth 2016–17

All measurements are in centimetres, height x width x depth.

LIST OF WORKS

JUDY WATSON waterline 2001 pigments on canvas 224 x 114 cm Bank Art Museum Moree Collection Presented in 2009 by Dr Ann Lewis, AO, as one in a collection of some 70 contemporary Aboriginal works. Presented through the Cultural Gifts Program two halves with bailer shell 2002 pigment and synthetic polymer paint on canvas 194 x 108 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2003 a complicated fall 2007 pigment and synthetic polymer paint on canvas 217 x 127 cm Private collection grandmother’s song 2007 pigment and pastel on canvas 196 x 107 cm Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Purchased 2007 with funds from Margaret Greenidge through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation and the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant

passing from the edge of memory to the night sky 2007 pigment and pastel on canvas 211 x 127 cm Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane The James C. Sourris AM Collection. Gift of James C. Sourris through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2010. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 40 pairs of blackfellows’ ears, lawn hill station part of salt in the wound 2008 cast beeswax dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane bunya 2011 pigment, synthetic polymer paint and watercolour pencil on canvas 212 x 156.5 cm Private collection proclamation 2011 pigment and synthetic polymer paint on canvas 213 x 156.6 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2012

resistance pins 2018 cast bronze with patina finish dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane resistance pins 2018 porcelain dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane the witness tree 2018 single channel video, four channel sound video duration 00:05:40 Video editor: Maria Barbagallo Sound design: Greg Hooper Cinematography: Judy Watson, Greg Hooper, Robert Andrew Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane boodjamulla wanami 2019 single channel video video duration 00:05:41 Video editor: Joshua Maguire Cinematography: Judy Watson Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane blue notes 2019–20 cyanotypes on paper dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

dugong bones 2020 synthetic polymer paint, graphite, indigo on canvas 190 x 105 cm Assistant: Victoria Maclean Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

resistance pins 2020 synthetic polymer paint, graphite, indigo on canvas 192 x 180 cm Assistant: Victoria Maclean Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

invasion 2020 single channel video video duration 00:14:50 Video editor: Joshua Maguire Sound design: Greg Hooper Cinematography: Ali Clark, Maria Barbagallo, Judy Watson Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

spot fires, our country is burning now 2020 synthetic polymer paint, pastel, graphite on canvas 194 x 181 cm Assistant: Dorothy Watson Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

passage of light and air 2020 synthetic polymer paint, aquarelle pencil on canvas 239 x 181.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane pituri bags 2020 synthetic polymer paint, indigo on canvas 190.5 x 71 cm Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane resistance 2020 pastel, synthetic polymer paint, indigo on canvas 189 x 71 cm Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

standing stone, grevillea 2020 synthetic polymer paint, aquarelle and graphite pencil on canvas 247 x 181 cm Assistant: Dorothy Watson Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane standing stone, kangaroo grass, bush string 2020 synthetic polymer paint, graphite on canvas 246 x 181 cm Assistant: Elisa Jane Carmichael Geelong Gallery Purchased through the John Norman Mann Bequest Fund and with funds generously provided by the Robert Salzer Foundation Acquisition Fund, 2020

standing stone, kangaroo grass, red and yellow ochre 2020 synthetic polymer paint and graphite on canvas 250 x 181.5 cm Assistants: Dorothy Watson and Victoria Maclean Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane standing stone, ochre net, spine 2020 synthetic polymer paint, graphite on canvas 245.5 x 181 cm Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane standing stone, open cut ground 2020 earth, synthetic polymer paint, graphite on canvas 233 x 182 cm Assistants: Victoria Maclean and Dale Harding (for providing Woorabinda earth) Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane standing stones, ashes to ashes 2020 earth, synthetic polymer paint, graphite on canvas 229 x 181 cm Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

standing stones, gumbi gumbi, stone tool 2020 earth, graphite, pastel, synthetic polymer paint, cotton on canvas 229.5 x 181 cm Assistants: Dorothy Watson (stitching), Victoria Maclean and Dale Harding (for providing Woorabinda earth, gumbi gumbi leaves, and some stitching) Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane standing stone with spines 2020 synthetic polymer paint, graphite on canvas 228.5 x 180 cm Assistants: Dorothy Watson and Victoria Maclean Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane standing stones with sutures on indigo 2020 synthetic polymer paint, indigo, pastel, china graph pencil, cotton on canvas 228 x 178.4 cm Assistants: Dorothy Watson (stitching) and Victoria Maclean Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane two moons, trooper’s buttons 2020 synthetic polymer paint, graphite, indigo on canvas 190 x 106.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

YHONNIE SCARCE Glass Bomb (Blue Danube) Series IV 2015 hand blown glass 20 x 60 x 20 cm RMIT University Art Collection Fallout Babies 2016 blown glass, acrylic and found hospital cribs dimensions variable Collection of the artist Only a mother could love them 2016 hand blown glass 25 x 15 cm diameter each (variable sizes - approx.) Monash University Collection Purchased by the Monash Business School 2017 Courtesy of Monash University Museum of Art Hollowing Earth 2016–17 blown and hot formed Uranium glass dimensions variable Collection of the artist Cloud Chamber 2020 hand blown glass, metal and wire dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne

Nucleus (U235) (1) 2020 hand blown glass dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne Nucleus (U235) (2) 2020 hand blown glass dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne Nucleus (U235) (3) 2020 hand blown glass dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne Nucleus (U235) (4) 2020 hand blown glass dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne Nucleus (U235) (5) 2020 hand blown glass dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne

BIOGRAPHIES

BIOGRAPHIES JUDY WATSON

Judy Watson was born in Mundubbera, Queensland and lives and works in Brisbane. Watson’s Aboriginal matrilineal family are Waanyi, whose Country is located in north-west Queensland. Watson works from site, archives and collective memory to reveal the fault lines of history within place and Country, lays bare the impact of colonial history and the institutional discrimination of Aboriginal people, celebrates Aboriginal cultural practice, and registers our precarious relationship with the environment. Her works comprise painting, printmaking, drawing, video, sculpture and public art. Watson has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK presented Judy Watson in 2020, a version to be shown at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria and touring. Judy Watson: the edge of memory was exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in 2018. In 2015, her work was included in Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, Tate Britain, London and Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation, British Museum, London. A major survey of Watson’s works made from 1989 to 2003, sacred ground beating heart, was exhibited in 2003 at the John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, WA, and at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane in 2004. Asialink toured a version of sacred ground beating heart in 2004 to Vietnam, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, and Australian venues. Watson co-represented Australia in the 1997 Venice Biennale. Major awards received include the Australia Council Visual Arts Award (Artist) in 2015; in 2006, the National Gallery of Victoria’s Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, and the Works on Paper Award at the 23rd Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award; and, in 1995, the Moët & Chandon Fellowship. In 2018, she received a Doctorate of Art History (honoris causa) from The University of Queensland.

Watson’s work is held in major Australian and international public collections, including: National Gallery of Australia; all Australian state art galleries; Museum of Contemporary Art / Tate collections; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; St Louis Art Museum, USA; The British Museum, London; Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK; Library of Congress, Washington, USA; Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia, USA; as well as significant private collections. Watson has received major public art commissions, including bara, to be installed at the Tarpeian Precinct Lawn above Dubbagullee (Bennelong Point), Sydney in 2020; tow row, bronze sculpture installed outside GOMA, Brisbane, 2016; ngarunga nangama: calm water dream, 300-square-metre artwork, 200 George Street, Sydney; yara, Flinders University, Adelaide, 2016; living well, murri kitchen and fragments, grounds of Townsville Hospital, 2016; water memory, Queensland Institute of Medical Research foyer, 2011; freshwater lens, beneath Turbot Street Overpass, Brisbane, 2010; fire and water, Reconciliation Place, Canberra, 2007; museum piece and two halves with baler shell, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, 2006; heart/land/river, Brisbane Magistrates Court foyer, 2004; ngarrn-gi land/law, 50-metre etched zinc wall, Victorian County Court, Melbourne, 2002; walama forecourt, sculptural installation at Sydney International Airport, 2000; wurreka, 50-metre etched zinc wall, Melbourne Museum, 2000. Judy Watson: blood language, a monograph by Judy Watson and Louise Martin-Chew, was published by The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing in 2009.

YHONNIE SCARCE Yhonnie Scarce was born in Woomera, South Australia, and belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the political nature and aesthetic qualities of glass and photography. Scarce’s work often references the ongoing effects of colonisation on Aboriginal people; in particular her research has explored the impact of the removal 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 strength of her ancestors, she offers herself as a conduit, sharing their significant stories from the past.

curated into major shows and public commissions throughout Australia, including the Biennale of Australian Art, Ballarat; Installation Contemporary, Sydney; the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and the Newcastle Art Gallery. Previous major shows include The National: New Australian Art 2017, Art Gallery of NSW, 2017; The 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, 2017; the 19th Biennale of Sydney, 2014; and a site-specific installation at the Art Gallery of South Australia as part of Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary and Torres Strait Islander Art, 2016.

Scarce was recently announced as the winner of the prestigious Yalingwa Fellowship, 2020, and was selected for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Architecture Commission, 2019. This commission, a collaboration with the architecture studio Edition Office titled In Absence, was the winner of the Small Building of the Year at the Dezeen Awards 2020. In 2018, Scarce was the recipient of the Kate Challis RAKA award for her contribution to the visual arts in Australia, as well as the Indigenous Ceramic Award from the Shepparton Art Museum.

In 2012, Scarce held a residency and exhibited at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum, University of Virginia, USA and participated in Aboriginal art symposiums at Seattle Art Museum and the Hood Museum, New Hampshire. Scarce’s work is held in major Australian public collections including: National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of South Australia; National Gallery Australia; Flinders University Art Museum; Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory; and the University of South Australia.

Recent international exhibitions include Paris Photo, Paris, France; Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan, Italy; Museum London, Ontario, Canada. Previous international shows include the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India, 2018; 55th Venice Biennale collateral exhibition Personal Structures, 2013, Venice; Galway Art Centre, Ireland, 2016; Harvard Art Museum, Massachusetts, 2016; Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum, Virginia, USA, 2012. Scarce was curated into the 2020 Adelaide Biennial at the Art Gallery of South Australia and has co-curated Violent Salt at Artspace Mackay, which will tour Australia until 2021. In 2018, Scarce was

NOWLEDGEMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CURATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the opportunity to curate Looking Glass on the lands of the Wurundjeri people and, along with the artists Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce, respectfully acknowledge their ongoing custodianship of their country. We also wish to acknowledge and pay our respects to the custodians of the lands to which this exhibition will travel. I would particularly like to thank the artists, Judy and Yhonnie, whose passion and commitment to telling the stories of our people has shone brightly throughout the difficulties of working amidst a global pandemic. I would like to thank Victoria Lynn, Anthony Fitzpatrick and Michelle Mountain and all the TarraWarra team for their considerable support and enthusiasm. I also extend my thanks to Jonathan Watkins and the team at Ikon Gallery, Thomas Ellmer, Mark Biddulph, Laura Jaunzems, Rachel Matthews, Melanie Pocock, Rebecca Small, Linzi Stauvers and all at Ikon, and particularly for their unstinting support of the artists both professionally and personally, at a challenging time. I acknowledge the major exhibition partner, The Balnaves Foundation, for their generous support of this exhibition.

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My thanks also extend to Claire Watson and Shae Nagorcka, NETS Victoria, for organising the extensive national tour of Looking Glass, and I thank Myles Russell-Cook for his excellent foreword. I am grateful to the public and private collectors who have generously made their works available for inclusion in the exhibition: Bank Art Museum Moree; the Monash University Collection, courtesy of Monash University Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art; the University of Queensland Art Museum; and RMIT University Art Collection, courtesy of RMIT Gallery. We also thank the private lenders who have generously loaned their treasured works for this exhibition. I also appreciate the collegiality of Kate Tuart, Bank Art Museum Moree; Nick Mitzevich, Kate Buckingham, National Gallery of Australia; Chris Saines, Judy Gunning, Emma Schneider, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art; Charlotte Day, Emma Neale, Monash University Museum of Art; Jon Buckingham, RMIT Gallery; Effie Skoufa-Klesnik, University of Queensland Art Museum.

AC ARTISTS’ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IMAGE CREDITS

Judy Watson would like to acknowledge her family: Peter, Otis and Rani Carmichael who accompanied her on the trip to the UK to visit standing stones. She thanks Jonathan Watkins and the team at Ikon Gallery, Hetti Perkins, Geraldine Barlow, Yhonnie Scarce, and Victoria Lynn, Anthony Fitzpatrick, Michelle Mountain, and the team at TarraWarra Museum of Art. She acknowledges the assistance of Gaye Sculthorpe and Jill Hassel at the British Museum, and Nicholas Thomas, Dr Ali Clarke and the team at The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Judy also extends her gratitude to Josh Milani and Milani Gallery and all of her collaborators: Dale Harding, Elisa Jane Carmichael, Victoria Maclean, Dorothy Watson (art assistants); Joshua Maguire (video editing); Greg Hooper (sound design); Ali Clark, Maria Barbagallo, Robert Andrew (cinematography); Dhana Merritt (research and administration assistant); Lani Weedon and Indy Medeiros (studio assistants); and UAP for resistance pins. Finally, she wishes to thank her parents Joyce and Don Watson, her sister Lisa Watson and Maria Barbagallo who accompanied her on her trip to north west Queensland.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY: Andrew Curtis: pp. 7, 29, 34–41, 56–58, 66–75, 79–85, 92–93, 104; Janelle Low: p. 87–89, 91, back cover; Carl Warner: front cover, pp. 8, 18–27, 30–33, 54. IMAGES SUPPLIED BY: Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane: pp. front cover, pp. 8, 18–27, 30–33, 42–47, 50–51; Courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne: p. 55; National Gallery of Australia: p. 53; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art: pp. 49, 52; RMIT University Art Collection, Melbourne: pp. 76–77; UQ Art Museum, Brisbane: p. 54.

Yhonnie Scarce would like to thank the Jam Factory Glass Associates of 2020 for their assistance with the creation of Cloud Chamber. She would also like to thank Kristel Britcher, Drew Spangenberg, George Agius for their support in creating Only a mother could love them, Fallout Babies and Nucleus U235. Architect Mikhail Rodrick for his many hours of ‘mapping’ her cloud works. She is incredibly thankful to Hetti Perkins and Judy Watson for their friendship and guidance. She also acknowledges the support of Victoria Lynn and the team at TarraWarra Museum of Art.

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FRONT COVER: Judy Watson, resistance pins 2020 (detail) BACK COVER: Yhonnie Scarce, Fallout Babies 2016 (detail) OVERLEAF: Yhonnie Scarce, Cloud Chamber 2020 (detail)

28 NOVEMBER 2020 – 8 MARCH 2021

LOOKING GLASS TOUR DATES

Curated by Hetti Perkins

Flinders University Museum of Art (SA): 26 April – 2 July 2021 Cairns Art Gallery (QLD): 11 December 2021 – 20 Feb 2022

TarraWarra Museum of Art 313 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road Healesville, Victoria 3777

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Art Museum (QLD): 12 March – 15 May 2022

Phone: +61 (0)3 5957 3100 Email: museum@twma.com.au Web: www.twma.com.au

Wangaratta Art Gallery (VIC): 26 August – 22 October 2023

Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00am – 5:00pm

Catalogue Editor: Hetti Perkins Authors: Victoria Lynn, Hetti Perkins, Myles Russell-Cook, Yhonnie Scarce, Judy Watson Managing Editor: Anthony Fitzpatrick Proofreaders: Anthony Fitzpatrick, Michelle Mountain, Shae Nagorcka, Claire Watson Catalogue design: Paoli Smith Creative Agency Catalogue printing: Adams Print Published by: TarraWarra Museum of Art and NETS Victoria, November 2020 ISBN 978-0-6487968-0-0

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Plimsoll Gallery (TAS): 12 August – 23 October 2022 Mildura Arts Centre (VIC): 8 June – 6 August 2023 Tour dates correct at time of publishing. A selection of the listed works will tour. For up to date details visit: www.netsvictoria.org.au

© Artists, photographers, authors and TarraWarra Museum of Art Ltd, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior consent in writing from the publisher, the artists, the photographers and the authors. Images remain copyright of the artists, photographers and appropriate authorities. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. All opinions expressed in the material contained in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the publisher.

LOOKING GLASS: JUDY WATSON AND YHONNIE SCARCE has been generously supported by

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THIS PROJECT IS SUPPORTED BY THE VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT THROUGH CREATIVE VICTORIA, AS WELL AS RECEIVING DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE FROM NETS VICTORIA’S EXHIBITION DEVELOPMENT FUND 2019, SUPPORTED BY THE VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT THROUGH CREATIVE VICTORIA, AND BY CREATIVE PARTNERSHIPS AUSTRALIA THROUGH THE AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL FUND.

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Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce

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TARRAWARRA MUSEUM OF ART FOREWORD by Victoria Lynn