She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile works with land through photographs that are cut, reassembled, and sutured into collaged forms. The seams have been left open; the ruptures are central to each work. Observing the sutured landscapes becomes a meditation on responsibility and on the uneasy coexistence of care, complicity, and inherited harm. The collages return the act of looking back onto the viewer, presenting their scars. To engage with them is to confront one’s position within ongoing colonial systems and to acknowledge the violences that remain embedded in the land and in the systems that have fractured its sovereignty. To look to the land is to feel the weight of what has been done to it and to those who belong to it, while recognising how it continues to nourish, restore, and strengthen. Looking demands attentiveness and accountability, insisting on the ethical and relational dimensions of vision itself. The images collaged throughout She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile combine photographs taken by the artist on unceded Country in south-western Victoria over the past decade —across the lands of the Wauthaurong, Bunurong, Wadawurrung, and Gunditjmara —with archival material sourced from the State Library of Victoria of the same areas. The archival images, produced exclusively by white colonial settler photographers, documented and mapped the land, creating visual records that both precede and actively participate in the colonial inscription of place. By bringing these materials into dialogue, the work creates a confrontation between lived Indigenous presence and the extractive logic of the colonial archive.A series of ten photographic collages 2O.5 X 15CM EACHfirst nations art, aboriginal australian art, gunditjmara culture, djabwurrung culture, indigenous knowledge systems, indigenous sovereignty, cultural reclamation, cultural memory, storytelling, contemporary indigenous identity, aboriginal women, womanhood, motherhood, indigenous feminism, spirituality, first nations, photography

Booklet contains Ganai Word List, activities for language learning and illustrations for children for colour.b&w illustrations, word lists, gamesganai, language reclamation, curriculum development, classroom planning, cultural and intellectual property, early childhood education, primary school education, classroom activities

Jenna Lee dissects and reconstructs colonial 'Indigenous dictionaries' and embeds the works with new cultural meaning. Long obsessed with the duality of the destructive and healing properties that fire can yield, this element has been applied to the paper in the forms of burning and mark-making. In Without Us, Lee uses charcoal to conceal the text on the page, viewing this process as a ritualistic act of reclaiming and honouring Indigenous heritage while challenging the oppressive legacies of colonialism. Lee explains in Art Guide (2022), ‘These books in particular [used to create the proposed works] are Aboriginal language dictionaries—but there’s no such thing as “Aboriginal language”. There are hundreds of languages. The dictionary just presents words, with no reference to where they came from. It was specifically published by collating compendiums from the 1920s, 30s and 40s, with the purpose to give [non-Indigenous] people pleasant sounding Aboriginal words to name children, houses and boats. And yet the first things that were taken from us was our language, children, land and water. And the reason our words were so widely written down was because [white Australians] were trying to eradicate us. They thought we were going extinct. The deeper you get into it, the darker it gets. But the purpose of my work is to take those horrible things and cast them as something beautiful.’Framed artwork