Jenna Lee

Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman, and KarraJarri woman with Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Anglo-Australian (Irish and Scottish) ancestry. Jenna Lee’s practice centres on exploring language, materiality, and the transformation of inherited narratives. Deeply intrigued by what is lost in translation, Lee explores the spaces between words—the felt but unseen—capturing the subtleties that surround language. Her work channels these overlooked nuances into immersive installations, works on paper, sculpture, and multimedia. Working primarily with books, viewed as colonial relics, Lee interrogates dictionaries that have poorly combined First Peoples languages alongside Larrakia linguistics, using them to better describe the world she sees around her. Through meticulous deconstruction and reconstruction, she engages with materials that echo the past, revealing the hidden stories they carry. Her work seeks to uncover the unseen forces shaping our understanding of history and identity, drawing attention to what time has eroded and collective memory has suppressed. By reimagining and reviving these whispered traces, Lee breathes life into dormant narratives, inviting reflection on the complexities and contradictions of inherited histories. Her analytical and intuitive approach allows her to explore the interplay between visible and hidden.