Presenting this incredible new body of work by glass artist Jenni Kemarre Martiniello OAM, a previous winner of the NATSIAA. Jenni has been a finalist in several awards over her art practice career and has been included in major public collections across Australia and overseas. Most recently Jenni was the winner of the Blake Acquisitive Art Prize 2026.
Jenni Kemarre Martiniello is an Arrernte (Australian Central Desert), Chinese and Anglo-Celtic artist using glass as a medium to articulate ideologies of identity and culture memory. A previous winner of the NATSIAA, Jenni has been a finalist in several awards over her art practice career and has been included in major public collections across Australia and overseas. Most recently Jenni was the winner of the Blake Acquisitive Art Prize 2026. Martiniello re-imagines traditional indigenous weaving practices through Venetian glass cane-work techniques, twisting, pulling and tiling fine threads of glass that echo a woven tactile surface and continues this exploration of indigenous practices and culture, while simultaneously reinterpreting an ancient Chinese Han Dynasty vessel, the Hu. This intersection of Indigenous and Chinese cultural narratives reflects Martiniello’s innovative and evolving practice, offering a new dialogue on identity, heritage and material culture.
These works channel environmental and spiritual elements from my Aboriginal, Chinese and Anglo-Celtic heritages and life experience. Their form references ancient Han Dynasty cocoon-shaped ceramic Hu, the form being the indicator of precious contents because silk cocoons were the source of ancient China’s wealth. Just as silk strands are fragile yet resilient and can be woven into myriad patterns and fabrics, so DNA strands are genetically complex and resilient, holding the patterns of generations, weaving and preserving place, genealogy, identity.
As a child of mixed cultural heritages growing up in Adelaide in the 1950s, the most powerful influences that shaped my experiences were story, poetry, art and music. On my Anglo-Celtic side, my mother was a classical pianist, a mezzo-soprano and a teacher. On the Chinese and Aboriginal side, my father was a quiet resistance hero whose transmission of heritage came through story and history, also accompanied by music. I remember jiving around the kitchen at a very young age to jazz issuing forth from the ever-present radio, and being transfixed by rhythm and blues, Gershwin and Rachmaninov. For me musical notes have always had shape and colour, constituting a lexicon that communicates far beyond the ear. The sound and tonal character of each individual instrument participates in that lexicon. They constitute another dimensional language that transcends inscriptions on sheet music, and has a deeply spiritual being. The murrine created for this work is an attempt to give visual expression to elements of that language. Accordingly, these hot blown glass Hu, or heritage cocoon jars, also hold something precious, the multilayered fusion of colours, stories, sounds and patterns of culturally and genetically transmitted perception.
