Jenna Lee is an artist based in Melbourne (previously Brisbane and London) who identifies as a ‘Queer, Mixed Race, Asian (Japanese, Chinese and Filipino), Aboriginal (Larrakia, Wadaman and Karajarri) Woman.’ Lee is the recipient of the 2019 Australia Council Young and Emerging Dreaming Award, presented at the National Indigenous Arts Awards in May as well as one of 10 finalists in the prestigious John Fries Award for emerging and early career Australian and New Zealander artists. In 2018 Jenna was a finalist in the 35th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA) as well a finalist in the 2018 Blacktown Art Prize. In 2018, Jenna won the tertiary category in the Libris Artist Book Prize for A Plant in the Wrong Place, now in the MRC Art Collection. The proposed acquisition will offer an update in Lee’s practice, since 2018, after what has been a very successful first two years in her art career, and will capture a popular highlight from the 2020 Libris Awards exhibition.

This work was created at about the same time as Lee was developing a commission for Rite of Passage, a 2020 QUT Art Museum exhibition for Indigenous artists’ voices observing the 250 anniversary of James Cook’s first contact with Indigenous Australia. As in the exhibition, Lee’s HIStory book 2020 responds to the mythology surrounding Cook ‘as the omnipresent, white, patriarchal narrative’ that is often prioritised over First Nations histories. The artist has deconstructed the pages of children’s illustrated copy of ‘The Story of Captain Cook – A Ladybird Book: An Adventure from History,’ pulping up the pages and re-fashioning them into blank pages that represent the unwritten future. She has also used the pulp to form two small dilly bags as her ancestors would have shaped them. Lee describes this is an ‘act of defiance and dominance over his story.’ The items sit inside an opened Solander box, an object closely associated with European museum collections. Named after Daniel Solander, a Swedish naturalist who travelled to Australia on Cook’s Endeavour, the Solander box is a physical rendering of the discourses of Enlightenment and white European racial superiority that exploited Indigenous people and their cultures.
Artspace Macaky, 2020