NAIDOC Spotlight: Jenna Lee

Jenna Lee, a keynote speaker at Tuesday’s NAIDOC Week event at QPS Headquarters, is a proud Larrakia woman and the artist behind the Look to the Stars artwork.

Twelve months after the project’s purpose-built working group first met in 2017, this NAIDOC Week has seen increased momentum in the state-wide rollout of the artwork.

It now features on police stations, uniforms, vehicles and official pins as well as products for members of the public.

The way these parts of the project came together for NAIDOC Week has been especially satisfying for Jenna.

“It’s a nice culmination, one year on,” she said.

As the lead artist at Gilimbaa creative agency, Jenna uses new technologies and contemporary design to interpret stories and adapt traditional Indigenous Australian artwork to different forms.

While Gilimbaa has previously undertaken high-profile projects, representing the breadth of experiences and perspectives in the Queensland community and the QPS was a unique challenge.

Early on, Jenna explored several possible concepts for the QPS project, but none felt quite right.

“We tried to fit so much in, the artworks were becoming too ‘busy’,” she said.

Seeing the simplicity and clarity in the work of Arnhem Land artist Nyapanyapa Yunupingu inspired Jenna to strip back the QPS artwork to its essentials and find a unifying theme to bring it together.

“Clarity is important. If we tried to say everything, we’d lose the message,” she said.

“We started to ask ‘what is universal? What connects all of us?’”

So, she looked to the stars.

“Everyone the world over has traditions or stories about the stars, and they all mean something different,” Jenna said.

“There’s also been a fresh interest in Indigenous Australian astronomy over the past year.”

Look to the Stars was developed through in-depth consultation with members of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and the QPS.

The working group brought together varied perspectives, with input from local Elders and sworn and unsworn QPS members, including the Cultural Engagement Unit and Detective Senior Sergeant Sam Bliss, another keynote speaker at the 2018 NAIDOC Week event.

“It was incredible to be given that trust, from all these people,” she said.

Having inclusive consultation from the start made the process smoother, with fewer back-and-forth changes.

One change that was implemented was for one of the stars to be five-pointed, to incorporate part of the Torres Strait Islander flag.

For Jenna, it was vital for people to look at the artwork and feel an instant connection, seeing themselves represented.

Before she started, Jenna was uncertain whether she was the right person to lead the project: looking at the QPS from the outside in, she didn’t see herself and her experience represented, and wasn’t sure how comfortably her ideas would fit.

Through collaboration with the working group and meeting people like DSS Bliss, Jenna realised the perspectives of Indigenous women had a place within the QPS.

It also made her passionate about creating an artwork where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members of the QPS could see themselves publicly recognised as being core to the future of Queensland policing.

“It was important to me that officers like Sam could look at this and feel proud of their role in the QPS,” she said.

Look to the Stars is an ongoing and evolving project, incorporating a complexity of different communities and cultural concerns.

Jenna hopes this artwork, reaching such a wide audience and different communities in many different ways, will assist a gradual change in Queensland.

“In the future, a whole new generation of community and QPS members will see their culture embedded in the service,” she said.

Pointing to examples such as the new police vehicle in Aurukun, Jenna believes this artwork creates a positive visual link between the QPS and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities of Queensland.

Jenna hopes Look to the Stars provides a momentum to build on, highlighting the potential of the QPS and their efforts to acknowledge traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and stories.

“The future isn’t just far away, it’s as soon as making a change tomorrow,” she said.

She thinks other communities could use art and collaboration to build relationships with the QPS in their own way.

“This is about artwork opening up conversations,” she said.