About Kemarre Arts
Kemarre Arts Crafts & Design was founded in 2006 by Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello as the Australian Capital Territory’s first and only arts based community social enterprise. Its brief is to provide support, liaison, mentoring, marketing and professional skills development across a range of visual and literary arts genres to First Nations artists living in the Australian Capital Territory and region.
Since its inception Kemarre Arts has provided support to over two hundred visual artists, writers, Aboriginal community groups and organisations, facilitated over 85 exhibitions in the ACT, NSW, Victoria and the Northern Territory, and auspiced multiple individual and community group projects to promote skills development and professional practice in literature and the visual arts. In 2012 Kemarre Arts was recognized for its achievements with an ACT NAIDOC Award for Most Outstanding Community Agency/Organisation.
Kemarre Arts Crafts and Design proudly supports the philosophy and Codes of Practice of the Australian Indigenous Art Code (IartC). Image to the left portrays Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello with one of her hot blown glass works displayed on an IartC national campaign poster.
About the artworks
The artworks presented in these galleries include original limited edition lino and wood prints, screen printed silk scarves and shawls, screen printed and hand painted silk wall hangings, vitreous enameled glassware, hand crafted jewellery, hot blown, enameled and/or slumped art glass, multimedia sculptural works, and woven and glass works by established and award winning First Nations artists; and anthologies of creative writing and socio-cultural commentary by emerging and established First Nations writers.
Our Artists
Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello OAM is an award winning multidisciplinary artist of Aboriginal (Lower Southern Arrernte), Chinese and Anglo-Celtic descent. As an internationally recognized glass artist her works are held in major private and public collections in Australia, the UK, USA, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific. She won the 2013 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, the Bay of Fires Arts Prize 2016, and Wollatuka Art Prize 2012. She has been a finalist in the Tom Malone, Hindmarsh, Fuse Art Glass, Ranamok and Waterhouse Prizes. She received Canberra Critics Circle Awards for both Literature and Visual Arts and received Creative Arts Fellowships from artsACT (2003) and the Australia Council for the Arts (2013-14). Jennifer is an Australian Design Award Honouree 2015, and was recognised for her community arts and cultural development work with an ACT International Womens Day Award 2010, inclusion on the ACT Centenary Honour Role 2013, ACT Womens Honour Role 2014 and ACT Senior Australian of the Year nomination in 2018. In 2023 Jennifer recognised as an Asia and Pacific Region Craft Master by the World Craft Council Australia. She received the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2022 for services to the creative and visual arts. In literature her poetry, short stories and essays have been widely published journals and anthologies in Australia and overseas. Her work has been included in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, she has judged both the NSW and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, including the David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Literature, and represented Australia as a First Nations artist and writer at the Festival of Pacific Arts in Palau 2004 and the Solomon Islands in 2012. Jennifer works from her studio at Canberra Glassworks on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal/Ngambri people.
Aunty Lynette Talbot is a Jerinja woman from the Yuin Nation on the South Coast of New South Wales. Until recently she was Project Officer at Burrunju Art Gallery and taught skills with fabrics and needles as part of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Arts program at the Yurauna Centre, Canberra Institute of Technology. Lyn is a painter and coil basket weaver who produces fine soft sculpture and multimedia works. She portrays cultural storytelling or storylines in artworks in glass, textiles, weaving, painting and pyrography. Lyn has exhibited widely in the ACT and region and has artwork in Calvary Hospital, other government institutions and private collections. In 2015 she worked with other Indigenous Textile and Glass Artists at the Canberra Glassworks culminating in the ANZAC Centenary Distant Warriors Exhibition. In 2023 Lyn is participating in the Cultural Casting Project at Canberra Glassworks with mentor Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello. Aunty Lyn works from her home studio and the Canberra Glassworks.
Lyndy Delian is a Wauthaurong woman from Western Victoria. A successful mid -career textiles and printmaking artist, Lyndy was one of the first Indigenous artists to have a residency at Canberra Glassworks in 2008 with outstanding results. Her glass skills have developed through artist's residencies in 2009 – 2014 in Australia and the USA, with her work shown in numerous exhibitions. Lyndy was ACT NAIDOC Artist of the Year in 2011. She is co-founder of the ACT Indigenous Textiles and Glass Artists Group (ITAG) with Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello in 2003, and co-founder of the Honouring Cultures Arts Initiative in 2012. She represented Australia as a First Nations visual artist at the Festival of Pacific Arts in the Solomon Islands in 2012. Her skills with multilayered separations in silk screen printing led her to develop her unique multilayered sand carving and engraving style in glass. Her work is held in various public and private collections, including National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Australia, Corning Museum of Glass USA, Canberra Museum and Gallery, the Canberra Institute of Technology, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, National Museum of Palau and National Art Gallery of the Solomon Islands.
Angela Saari is a First Nations artist and weaver from Aoteoroa New Zealand. She began developing her creative talents in the visual arts through Belco Arts Ignite Program, doing a range of workshops from drawing, glass and soft sculptures to weaving. These days she works from her home studio.
Other artists - details to come shortly. This section is still under development.