Jenni Kemarre Martiniello OAM is an award-winning glass artist, poet, writer and photographer and cultural leader of Arrente, Chinese and Anglo-Celtic descent, whose practice spans glass, sculpture, textiles and literature. Her art is distinguished by innovative material approaches that reinterpret Indigenous woven forms through non-traditional media, particularly glass.
A graduate of the Canberra School of Art with a Bachelor of Arts, Martiniello later completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Philosophy at the Australian National University. In 2011, through a residency at Canberra Glassworks, she developed a distinctive sculptural practice translating traditional woven structures, such as fish traps, into glass. Her work Golden Brown Reeds Fish Trap won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2013. She has received numerous honours, including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Visual Arts Fellowship (2013–15) and the Bay of Fires Art Prize (2016).
Her work is held in major national and international collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, Australian Parliament House, the British Museum, and the Belau National Museum. Martiniello has undertaken international residencies at the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. She has served on numerous arts advisory boards and was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) in 2022 for services to the creative and visual arts.
Jenni Kemarre Martiniello’s pieces demonstrate a duality of Indigenous and glass cultures, traditional and contemporary ideologies of strength and fragility, which encompass the warp and weft of time. Martiniello embraces 60,000 years of Indigenous Australian culture through her identity and the medium of glass. 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.
