Aboriginal artist recreating 'oldest living weaving practice' with glass

Sat 11 Jul 2026 at 8:31am

Sat 11 Jul 2026 at 8:31am

Jenni Kemarre Martiniello can recall visiting the South Australian Museum as a child and being horrified by the "hideous ancient dioramas" that depicted Aboriginal people as "basically an extinct race".

The clothing, mats and weaving were framed as "a thing from another era".

"It made me really, really angry then because my aunties were weavers, and I knew it was still a living practice,"

she said.

Decades later, her foray into glass art began with a simple question: "Can I weave glass?"

Of course, she could not. But the Lower Southern Arrernte woman found she could use a technique incorporating thin rods of coloured glass to create intricate woven patterns.

"It really became, for me, a political act to take an Italian cane technique that's centuries old to give expression to a weaving practice that is millennia old,"

the Canberra-based artist said.

Working with glass became "addictive".

Her fragile glass artworks are modelled after traditional items like dillybags, eel traps and fish scoops.

"They're just exquisite," she said.

"[They're] such a wonderful example of the oldest living weaving practice in the world."

More recently, Martiniello has been inspired by bush medicine plants and Rainbow Serpent eggs.

"Sometimes you feel, especially a lot in our community, that you have to stick with traditional materials to continue culture," she said.

"But contemporary materials actually offer an incredible wealth of new ways of preserving culture."

Martiniello is a finalist in this year's National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in Darwin.

She won the long-running and prestigious prize back in 2013.

Her entry this year pays homage to her Chinese heritage through her interpretation of a Han dynasty hu vase.

Martiniello was inspired by her paternal grandfather, who left China in the 1860s and eventually established a lush market garden in the outback town of Oodnadatta in South Australia, where he would marry a Lower Southern Arrernte woman.

"There is so much more to heritage that needs to be told — so many more stories,"

she said.

Since her first glass workshop in 2007, Martiniello has been working alongside a team at Canberra Glassworks to bring her creations to life.

The institution's deputy director Wendy Dawes said Martiniello had "spearheaded" a new wave of glass artists.

"What Jenni's done is opened up a lot of doors and given artists, First Nation artists, a road into glass,"

she said.

"There's a 2,000-year history in glass making, and it's linking up with this beautiful 65,000-year story of First Nation artists,"

Ms Dawes said.

The winners of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards will be announced on August 7.