“I have concentrated on the incredibly beautiful forms of traditional woven eel traps, fish traps, fish scoops and dillibags, seeking to evoke the interplay of light and form found in those objects, and in so doing, create contemporary glass works which are also objects of cultural as well as artistic significance.” ”

Jenni Kemarre Martiniello

AUSTRALIAN. ARRERNTE, B. 1949

Contemporary urban-based Arrernte artist Jenni Kemarre Martiniello creates sculptural objects in hot blown glass, coldworked glass and canes that are inspired by the aesthetics of traditional Aboriginal woven forms. In using glass, a non-traditional medium adapted from centuries-old techniques, to make traditional Indigenous forms, Martiniello explores the relationships between cultures and filters them through her personal relationship to the land. Her intimately layered lines represent an Indigenous way of being and existing in time and space that is cyclical rather than linear, encompassing the past, present and future.

Jenni Kemarre Martiniello is an award-winning visual artist, poet, writer, and photographer of Arrernte, Chinese and Anglo-Celtic descent. She was NAIDOC Artist of the Year in 2010, and was awarded Canberra Critics Circle Awards for Visual Arts in 2011 and 2013. In 2013 she won the prestigious Telstra Prize for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. Her works are held in numerous public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian Parliament House Collection, the National Museum of Palau, the National Art Gallery of the Solomon Islands, the Corning Museum of Glass and the British Museum. Jenni works from her studio at Canberra Glassworks.

Martiniello was resident artist at the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio in Norfolk and at Kluge Ruhe Museum of Aboriginal Art in late 2018.