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Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce

TarraWarra Museum of Art
by
ABR Arts 11 December 2020

Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce

TarraWarra Museum of Art
by
ABR Arts 11 December 2020

Just inside the first large gallery space at the TarraWarra Museum of Art is a wall-size photograph of a cemetery in a palette of muted greys. The graves are homogenous, modest, tilting with age. Scattered among the headstones are sun-bleached plastic flowers and concrete teddy bears clasping empty concrete vases. In front of the photograph stands a mortuary table bearing blackened glass objects.

The site is Woomera Cemetery. The glass bush plums are ‘darkened and deformed to represent … children born without body parts’, according to a wall plaque for Only a Mother Could Love Them (2016). Each embryonic, spherical form is punctured with a lipped, lopsided hole, like a bubble burst in lava; stems resemble severed umbilical cords. Around the corner, Fallout Babies (2016) – bush plums in opaque white glass – stand on hospital cribs.