Jenna (Mayilema) Lee

About the work

to gather, to nourish, to sustain

to gather, to nourish, to sustain is an installation of 48 works on paper that celebrates and highlights the profound connectedness between the Gulumerridjin (Larrakia) language and the ecology of our Country. This work focuses on three paper dilly bags as the physical objects used in acts of gathering, surrounded by extensive context that fills the space with words relating to their use, materiality, and purpose. Doing so restores these objects to their rightful context within our ecology.

The installation comprises three physical dilly bags and over 45 works on paper (both made with ochre on 53x74cm diamond-shaped Japanese paper). Each work is an iconographic rendering of a word representing sources of nourishment (land and water gathering) and ingredients for living (tools).

The diamond-shaped paper was explicitly chosen to imagine a way of writing out language without using the Latin alphabet. Traditional mark-making in our culture consists of extensive cross-hatching, making the diamond a natural choice for an underlying ‘grid’ – a system formed by the negative space between each word. By utilising shapes, forms, and grids already present in our visual language, I avoid introducing new systems to translate our words, staying true to our ancestral ways of communication.

Grasstrees

Over 100 years ago, the words ‘linguistic poverty’ were printed and distributed in the Australian Aboriginal Native Words and Their Meanings national handbook to describe First Peoples languages. Statements such as these were written, repeated and spread in various ‘Aboriginal Language’ dictionaries and presented as fact. These books were widely published for decades to provide “those who are in search for names of houses, children, boats and other purposes, will find a rich treasury of words native to their own land…”

While simultaneously being dispossessed from land and waters and having children stolen, our words were served up with no correction to people or place for the leisurely consumption of settlers. These so-called dictionaries published our words with no context or connection to people or places. With over 250 languages, including 800 dialectal variants, these books homogenise our people, reinforcing harmful misrepresentations that persist today.

My ongoing body of work transforms these fraudulent books into thriving Xanthorrhoea (Grass trees), a pyrophytic plant that thrives under elemental forces of deconstruction and reconstruction. In doing so, I state that our languages have always been abundantly rich and that our prosperity is multifaceted – from the sheer number of unique languages spoken to the rich depth of connection, our words provide us, as well as the collective effort of our people to reinvigorate languages.

 

Homespun

Homespun is an installation exploring the theme of domestic sanctuary, celebrating the often unseen, quiet moments of queerness within the intimacy of our homes. This work honours the safety and happiness I experienced in my childhood home, where my siblings and I were raised strong in culture and taught to be ourselves and supported to love who we choose to love. It also captures cherished moments from the home I share with my partner, Annie, where I experience moments of profound queer bliss, such as sharing a morning coffee or walking the dog. Through this installation, I aim to illuminate the sanctity and joy of these personal, everyday spaces and celebrate moments of ‘quiet queerness’.

The installation comprises actual furniture from my childhood home, painted black. Each piece features a pair of woven drinking vessels related to memories of quiet queer bliss. Whether it’s martini glasses from nights spent drinking cosmos and discussing pronouns and gender as a family or mugs from the ritual morning cup of coffee had with my partner of 11 years, these vessels represent domestic moments of warmth and nourishment, provided by both the liquid consumed and the moments of connecting as a queer family.

About the artist

Jenna Lee is a First Nations Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian (Irish and Scottish) ancestry. Driven to create work that transforms the scars of colonialism, Lee builds on a foundation of her father’s staunch teachings of culture and her mother’s gentle teachings of paper craft. 

 

With a practice focused on materiality, ancestral material culture and Gulumerridjin knowledge-based method and process, Lee interrogates notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and the lies presented within settler-colonial books and texts. Lee ritualistically analyses, deconstructs, and reconstructs these source materials, language and books, transforming them into forms of cultural beauty and pride. 

 

Lee’s work, primarily in immersive installations, includes objects, works on paper, and multi-media. In these, she demonstrates the transformative power of First Nations’ ways of being, thinking, and doing on the materials, legacies, and environmental conditions inherited through colonialism.