To gather, to nourish, to sustain: Jenna Lee at the COX Gallery
The collective title of this installation to gather, to nourish, to sustain in essence answers the question “What is a dillybag used for?”
The installation, by artist Jenna Lee, focuses on three paper dillybags as the physical objects used in acts of gathering. The space is filled with words relating to their use, their materiality, and their purpose, giving these objects back their context within our ecology.
Each work on paper is an iconographic rendering of a word representing:
- Sources of nourishment from land (persimmon dyed).
- Sources of nourishment from water (indigo dyed).
- Ingredients for living, tools and materials (undyed white).
Jenna Lee was born on Ngunnawal country (Canberra, ACT) and lives and works on Naarm, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung country (Melbourne, VIC). She is a Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian ancestry. She uses art to explore and celebrate her many overlapping identities.
With a practice focused on materiality and ancestral material culture, Jenna works with notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and settler-colonial books and texts. She ritualistically analyses, deconstructs and reconstructs source material, language and books, transforming them into new forms of cultural beauty and pride, and presenting a tangibly translated book. Driven to create work in which she, her family, and the broader mixed First Nations community see themselves represented, Lee builds on a foundation of her father’s teachings of culture and her mother’s teachings of papercraft.
Image credits in order of appearance:
Andrew Curtis, courtesy of Jenna Lee and MARS Gallery
Jade Florence Photography
Andrew Curtis, courtesy of Jenna Lee and MARS Gallery
To gather, to nourish, to sustain will be shown at the COX Gallery
When: 23 September – 25 October, with the gallery open 9am-5pm
Where: The COX Gallery is located at 1/19 Eastlake Parade, Kingston, ACT