Maker Directory

Jenna Lee

Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo Australia ancestry. Using art to explore her many overlapping identities, Lee works across sculpture, installation, body adornment. With a practice focused on materiality and ancestral material culture, Lee works with notions of the archive and histories of colonial collecting. Lee was honoured to be the recipient of the Wandjuk Marika 3D Memorial Award at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA) and the Australia Council's Dreaming Award. She has been a finalist in national awards, including the prestigious John Fries Award for emerging and early career artists and the KWM Contemporary First Nations Art Award. Lee is represented by MARS Gallery in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia).

See Jenna's work within "Unearthed" at Craft Victoria 1st - 31st October 2022.

Working with these materials has been a new and exciting challenge - the materials themselves asking me to step outside my traditionally paper-based practice. I had to think of ways the paper from books I work with is connected to these objects through ways outside of just materiality. I found that it was only on digging through the materials and studying their forms and origins did a clear series form, with the aim of not altering the archaeological remains too much, but rather adding to them to change the way they are read.

/ Jenna Lee