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At the official opening of the prestigious Guirguis New Art Prize (GNAP) at the Art Gallery of Ballarat on Friday 24 March, Judge Simon Maidment awarded the $20,000 to Melbourne-based artist Yhonnie Scarce. Her work, The More Bones the Better (2016), is an installation comprising six medical beakers, tubing and hand blown glass.
Yhonnie Scarce, The More Bones the Better, 2016
Simon Maidment, Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne said of the work;
“The winning work by Yhonnie Scarce captures the sensitivity to materials she displays throughout her artistic practice. The blown and shattered glass elements are a delicate contrast to the shocking and little discussed histories of Aboriginal exploitation and abuse in the name of science in Australia”. He continues, “Engaging this topic, this work is haunting, in the same way those lived and documented experiences continue to haunt the collective unconscious of this country. Yhonnie Scarce’s work, The More Bones the Better (2016), I believe makes an important contribution to the Collection of Federation University Australia and will engage and move diverse audiences with its technical accomplishment, beauty and message.”
Yhonnie Scarce, The More Bones the Better, 2016
A work which raises significant issues that still affect Indigenous communities today, Shelley Hinton, Curator of the Post Office Gallery, Federation University Australia expressed that, “The work challenges us ethically and culturally and in a way that pleads for analysis.”
Yhonnie Scarce was born in Woomera, South Australia and belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples. Scarce embraces a non-traditional approach to glass-blowing using glass as more than a mere material. Acting as a lens and a mirror, she reflects and exposes the tragedies of Australia’s colonisation.
Within her research, Scarce encountered a variety of ethnographic studies examining the use of scientific interventions amongst Indigenous cultures. This work metaphorically looks at these situations and poses questions of what might have gone on in such laboratories.
Scarce’s work will join Ash Keating’s highly charged 3-channel video installation West Park Proposition (2012), from GNAP13 and Lou Hubbard’s dramatic work, Dead Still Standing (2014), from GNAP15.
Yhonnie Scarce, The More Bones the Better, 2016
Now in its third iteration, the biennial project has supported forty artists working in new and emerging media and technologies, from every state and territory in Australia. From this year’s pool of sixty artists, fourteen artists were selected as finalists for the 2017 exhibition and prize – Abdul Abdullah, Joel Arthur, Erin Coates, the art collective DAMP (Narelle Desmond, Debra Kunda, Sharon Goodwin and James Lynch), Carly Fischer, Natasha Johns-Messenger, Jumaadi, Julia McInerney, Brian Robinson, Julia Robinson, Alistair Rowe, Yhonnie Scarce, Esther Stewart and Peter Vandermark.
Works include video, sculpture, painting, photography, textiles, installation and sound, with several hybridised mixed-media installations which explore richly layered ideas surrounding illusion and the ‘gaze’; the domestic and gender issues; indigenous culture and traditions; fantasy, fact and fiction, and life, death and politics.
Arts Academy, Post Office Gallery
Federation University Australia
25 March to 14 May, 2017
Victoria
Art Gallery of Ballarat
25 March to 14 May, 2017
Victoria
