Jenna Mayilema Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman, and KarraJarri woman with Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. Interrogating language, materiality and inherited narratives through immersive installation, works on paper, sculpture and multimedia, her practice engages with systems of knowledge and translation. Working primarily with books as material, Lee engages dictionaries and language publications that have flattened First Peoples’ languages. Using Larrakia linguistics as a guiding framework, she extracts and reworks narratives embedded within these texts. Through deconstruction and reconstruction, she translates them into new forms that respond to the limits and residues of colonial knowledge systems.
Jenna Lee is represented by MARS Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne.