Interview #191 — Jenna Lee

by Jinghua Qian

Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo Australian ancestry. With a practice focused on materiality, she works across sculpture, installation, body adornment, digital media and graphic design to explore and celebrate her many overlapping identities.

She has exhibited nationally and internationally and won the Wandjuk Marika 3D Memorial Award at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA), the Australia Council’s Dreaming Award and Libris Artist Book Prize.

Jenna spoke to Jinghua Qian about art versus craft, what’s behind a book cover, and the history of the pearling industry.

You had a residency with Craft Victoria last year and now you’re on the board there—how do you feel about the terms ‘art’ and ‘craft’? They can be so loaded, especially in relation to gender and race.

I think of myself as using craft techniques and craft ways of thinking about processes and materials.

I first started thinking about craft when I was researching for an application for a two-month residency in Kyoto through the Australia Council (which I received but it’s been postponed to next year). As I was researching paper craft, I was reading more and more about the cultural importance of craftspeople and of traditional craft, especially in Kyoto. It resonated with me thinking about how Aboriginal people think of and respect our master weavers and makers.

I see craft as being a dedication to a material and process—you have makers dedicating their entire lives to a material or object or process. My work is so materially driven, and this way of thinking has really resonated with me.

As for it being a loaded space, this is something I am really aware of and am still working through. That historical idea that men are artists and women make craft is something I am really hyper conscious of. Craft seems to have such dirty connotations, but as we move towards more conscious consumerism—and we see newer generations interested in art collecting—the craft sector can be an amazing place to begin. Purchasing contemporary craft means you have a beautifully handcrafted and often usable object, and you have also supported a dedicated crafts person.

I think I want my advocacy and involvement to make sure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander makers are represented in these spaces. We were the first craftspeople on this land.

What comes first for you: medium or concept?

Definitely medium. I tend to draw almost all of the meaning in my work from the materials I am using, materials that evoke memories in myself or viewer: the altered cutlery and serving ware works I create are purposely the type of silverware that I think many Anglo Australians would remember from their grandparents’ or parents’ house—still in their box in the ‘good cabinet’ or the spare odd one that hangs around in the drawer.

I love working with materials that have had a life—that have memories and histories that I can intervene in or alter.

A good example of how I approach materials are my works for the Hyphenated Biennial: I am exploring, sharing and celebrating my mixed Aboriginal, Asian, Anglo Australian heritage as a way of dissecting moments in Australia’s recent history which has had an impact on my ancestors.

For this body of work, I am focusing on materials representative of these moments, such as the pearling industry boom, as well as materials of cultural significance to my various overlapping identities: mother-of-pearl shells and buttons, red silk thread, Larrakia ochres, tea, Japanese and Chinese art papers, souvenir ‘shell’ ephemera from Darwin and Broome and more! The plan for this body of work is to simply present a list of materials as my statement.

I love that. What’s your approach to the historical research part of the project? Anything you’ve come across that really surprised you?

When I went back to university to study art (only finished a year of it), I called my dad and asked to hear more of our family story. I wanted to know how exactly the Japanese and Chinese side of our family came to be in Australia. He told me the most incredible story of my great (x3) grandmother, Arase, being kidnapped off the streets of Japan very young in the late 1800s and brought to Broome to dive for mother-of-pearl shell (I have also read accounts of the human traffic sex trade at that time).

It was known that young Japanese women were excellent divers and very good at holding their breath. But before she could be put to work, she managed to escape from the ship when it docked. She was found wandering in the mangroves by a Chinese man, Harry Sue Lee, who took her in as a ‘house keep’. They subsequently had a child together who would be my great-great grandfather, Jimmy Lee, born in 1897. The family story then goes that after they had Jimmy, they travelled back to China, whereupon Harry’s family seeing that he had a half-Japanese child—well, Harry mysteriously died the next day (the family story is poison). Arase, then stranded in China with a baby, made her way back to her village in Japan, and when her family saw she had a half-Chinese baby, she was banished. She managed to get back to Australia and lived between Broome and Darwin. She’s buried in the Japanese section of the Darwin Cemetery. Jimmy went on to be a watchmaker.

All of this unfolded because of the discovery of Pinctada maxima—the largest species of mother-of-pearl in the northern waters off Australia. At the time, prior to the invention of plastic, mother-of-pearl was the strongest and most long-wearing material for making buttons. The European demand for buttons meant there was a massive pearling industry boom in the north: Broome, Darwin, Far North Queensland and the Torres Strait. And where there was a boom there was a need for labour. Aboriginal people were first to be taken advantage of through blackbirding, as they were already known to dive for the shells themselves for body adornment. But as the population of the shell was depleted, they needed more divers to go even deeper. Many people died. With the invention of plastic—the industry collapsed.

It’s incredible to think about how all these lives can come together in a single button. You’ve described how your practice draws from both your paternal culture and the papercraft techniques and traditions of your maternal lineage. Did you grow up making art?

Absolutely—art, craft, making and creativity were a huge part of my childhood.

My dad raised myself and all my siblings so strong and connected to culture, we always knew who we were—and what our cultural connections are. Both my parents made sure we grew up with culture around us in the forms of books, food, art, objects. It was a very vibrant upbringing.

My mum is an educator, she trained as a home economics teacher and has been a high-school teacher specialising in special needs education for the past decade. Growing up with a mum who is a teacher and who was a stay-at-home parent for the first 16 years of my life meant that my childhood was rich with learning and making.

We didn’t have game consoles or computers and TV was kept at just 30 minutes in the morning (hello, Sailor Moon on Cheez TV) and again in the afternoon. So, to keep us entertained we made art and craft. My mum actually taught me how to make recycled paper as a child.

This process of making recycled paper is where my art practice started as an adult. I pulped and sculpted dilly bags from old books using the exact techniques she taught me. Mum worked at a Japanese paper store before she was a teacher, so I grew up knowing about paper, how it works and to respect its beauty.

As well as your contemporary arts practice, you’re also a book designer for UQP. What’s that process like—working with an author and publisher as your client—compared to when you’re creating solo?

My art practice actually came about after being an agency designer for about seven years. I love being creative and working with clients on their ideas, but I really needed an outlet to explore the ideas I was having.

I was actually slowly moving away from design, I had really lost my passion for it and started having those ‘well at least it pays the rent’ thoughts. It was about that time that UQP approached me to design the cover for Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear. Book cover design had always been a dream of mine, one I had subconsciously put aside. Working on that cover, I got the swell of excitement and obsession over wanting to make something amazing, a feeling I hadn’t had for years.

The next author I worked with was Tony Birch, who got an element I designed for his poetry collection Whisper Songs tattooed. After that, I was sold on dedicating my time between art and book cover design, and I’ve now worked on ten books for five different publishers. The next ones due to come out are Jazz Money’s How to Make a Basket and SJ Norman’s Permafrost. I work primarily with First Nations authors, many of them poets, and I think there is just this overwhelming sense of trust and respect between us because I know some of where they are coming from.

In my art, I primarily work with second-hand colonial-settler books that were written about us without us: I pull them apart and transform them into new forms, with my intervention acting as the missing voice. So, to come full circle and work as a book cover designer for the most phenomenal First Nations authors whose voices are being published and read is an incredible feeling.

That’s such a powerful juxtaposition. Looking at your covers, to me they feel quite crisp and restrained but I’m curious if you see them that way. How would you describe your design approach?

Absolutely! I have always been drawn to bold, clean and simple design, and in both my art practice and design work, I want to say as much as I can with as little as possible.

I think I really value clever design, design that can use a few well-placed elements and colours or fonts to open up deeper levels of meaning. I think if I spell everything out on a cover, there is less opportunity for people’s curiosity to lead them to engaging with the book with an open mindset.

I always want a possible reader to pick up a book cover and want to know more. Especially in the First Nations space, there is a well-established idea of what Aboriginal art or design should look like, and what Aboriginal voices should sound like. I am interested in using my design practice to broaden that understanding because this place has always been a continent of many diverse nations and our experiences as Aboriginal people are different and all valid.

I have been so blessed to work with authors who are also interested in pushing those ideas and are supportive of my visions for the covers. In a past life as a graphic designer at an agency, I would have clients always ask to ‘add more dots’ so that it was clear that it was Aboriginal and for Aboriginal audiences. Our visual communication as First Nations peoples has always been so much deeper and more complex than dots and everything—design with intent is inherently an extension of generations of Aboriginal visual expression.

Every book I design, I ask myself: if I saw this on a shelf in a bookstore, would I pick it up? My ultimate goal is to make sure the cover does justice to the incredible words inside but also helps my author make money in the way I can.

I’m struck by your palette—often just two or three colours, with that kind of rich seal paste red that’s so evocative for me. Tell me how you think about colour.

I used to be so scared of colour in my work. People will view a work with their own set of ideas around the meaning or feeling of colour and that is a really culturally driven perspective. Having a mix of diverse cultures, I know that within my own family customs, colours are conflicting. I used to work a bit with ochre colours that I collected from my country but when I started working with red, it really clicked for me that this one colour could make nods to so many of my overlapping identities.

Red for me represents blood—but never in a bloodshed kind of way—but more blood ties. It’s a really important colour culturally in Larrakia women’s customs and of course in Japanese and Chinese culture, and of course it is present in the Aboriginal flag. My Mum also has Scottish ancestry, and the family tartan has lines of red running through it.

Red also often represents ‘correcting’ in my work. I am going into these books and making physical edits with a red pen. Which is why I work with calligraphy ink a lot. I still want the material to be related to the original intent, I just use it in a different way.

Working with paper and books also means that a lot of the time, my base palette is black and white, and with my work originally looking at overlapping identities and ‘grey spaces’, I thought this was really important, to keep that stark black and white in my work.

I work with blue as well a lot in my projection works in public space, and ultimately that is because I can’t use red because it can distract from traffic signals haha.

You obviously have a deep love for poetry that’s evident in your reading, the books you’ve designed, your collaboration with your sister Mackenzie Lee for the Hyphenated digital program, and the use of language in your solo practice. And that’s so logical to me because there’s a kind of texture that extends across the different parts of your practice, but I know some days I’m suddenly averse to verbalising things and I wonder if that happens to you.

Texture is such a great way to describe it—I’m going to start using that! thank you—I definitely think of text fragments within my work as textural. The purpose of my sculptural works which use old books has always been to make sure the words are no longer comprehensible anymore but are still present.

My use of poetry and language has come as a bit of a surprise to me in adult life. I was terrible at English at high school and really slow to pick up reading and writing in primary school, to the point where I had to go to a developmental doctor when teachers noticed I was falling more and more behind. I thought I hated poetry because it was art without any of the visual cues I needed as a kid to help me comprehend things.

Something switched later in life. I think with my love for print design and typesetting, I started seeing words as being visual—as a set of symbols that could evoke visual images in my mind. I think learning more about type at university while studying design helped me understand the anatomy of letters and think of words in a visual way.

I realised when I started making art that I could represent whole concepts with a word without having to illustrate or depict the actual idea. Working with Gulumerridjin (Larrakia) language probably sealed the deal with worlds like balarr which mean to light up, to make light and to dawn. I just think that is so visually stunning.

When I started reading the poetry of authors like Ellen Van Neerven, who are mixed race, Aboriginal, queer and my age, I really clicked that really, I was just reading the wrong poetry. Like art, poetry is subjective, and I just needed to find poets whose words resonate with me. Which is why I love collaborating with Mackenzie. We have the same blood and their perspective on things is something that resonates with me at a deep tissue level, but they always bring forward ideas and concepts in our collaborations that I never would have thought of and that is so exciting to me.

Do you have any advice for emerging artists?

I always go on about the importance of entering awards. Even if you aren’t selected as a finalist, someone in the industry has seen your work and it declares to them that you are serious about your practice.

I understand entering awards can sometimes have a fee though most awards for First Nations art or that have a First Nations category are free for Indigenous artists. But if the fees are something that you can’t justify multiple times a year, choose a few that are best suited to your practice or ones that are local to where you live or are connected. I try to always enter ‘Works on Paper’ awards with a focus on paper as the medium, as that is my core practice.

If money is really an issue, I would encourage you to email the curator or organiser and keep an eye out for any and all free to enter awards. It helps to keep an awards calendar: Art Almanac has an amazing free list that is updated monthly.

What have you been listening/reading to?

I have been reading a lot of poetry books of late, mostly because as a designer I create book covers and First Nations poetry is what I do most. I just finished Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear and am in Tony Birch’s Whisper Songs, both books I did the covers for.

I am halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge, I became somewhat obsessed with her after reading Memory Police which I can safely say is now my favourite book. On my side is also the Liminal anthology Collisions. And my current graphic novel is Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

How do you practise self-care?

I have to say not all that well at the moment. It’s something I am working on and have been trying to make more of an effort on. When things get busy with deadlines, my physical and mental health seem to slip to the bottom of the to-do list.

But on the whole, my art practice is a form of self-care. Being a graphic designer, my art practice came about as a way to try and work through some of my own identity questions as well as use my hands and get away from a computer.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

As the Asian sides of my family came to Australia so many generations ago, and being Aboriginal, I am not sure I feel fully ‘Asian’ or ‘Australian’. I think I’ve always struggled a bit with identity and feeling like I dwell mostly in the spaces between set identities. I find that, looking the way I do, people tend to see in me what they are most familiar with and are confused by the bits that don’t add up.

My ‘Asian-ness’ is actually one of the things people will point out when questioning my Aboriginality—physically I have a melding of all of my cultures but people always seem to point out my ‘Asian’ eyes as why I don't ‘look’ Aboriginal.

I am incredibly proud of all sides of my cultural heritage and this can get a little ‘messy’ when people want a clear answer. I feel like I have found great joy in the messy melding and being a part of projects like Hyphenated Biennial has helped me connect with people with similar joys.