Scarce's art is informed by the effects of colonisation on
Indigenous Australia. 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. In 2020 Scarce created a work called
Cloud Chamber, made from 1,000 glass yams hung from the ceiling, one of a series of works exploring the effects of the
British nuclear tests at Maralinga on the
Maralinga Tjarutja people. Scarce works at the glass studio at
JamFactory. ==Curation==