With deep reverence to the arts, we are honoured to announce our partnership with Melbourne Art Fair, a seminal fixture on the Australasian cultural calendar.

This year's theme is centred around Djeembana––a word of the Boon Wurrung––described as a lacuna in language, where direct translation fails. Loosely alluding to ‘place’, Djeembana is more broadly a meeting point for community, ideas, ritual, and knowledge.

Paying homage to this year’s theme, The Portrait Series profiles four of the region’s most respected artists, whose works are forever woven into the fabric of contemporary art in Australia.

Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian ancestry. Using art to explore and celebrate her many overlapping identities, Lee works across sculpture, installation, and body adornment. She also works with moving images, photography and projection in the digital medium.

With a practice focused on materiality and ancestral material culture, Lee works with notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and settler-colonial books and texts. Lee 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.