Jenna Mayilema Lee, Category of Significance: Ancestral (Tamarindus indica) 2025
Pages of ‘Aboriginal words and place names’, wire, video projection, Glass: Marcus Dillon
Installation view, Awakening Histories, Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, 2025. Photo: Andrew Curtis
Pages of ‘Aboriginal words and place names’, wire, video projection, Glass: Marcus Dillon
Installation view, Awakening Histories, Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, 2025. Photo: Andrew Curtis
This work brings together fifteen glass tamarind seeds, each sprouting saplings cut from the pages of Aboriginal Words and Place Names. The number gestures to the fifteen tamarind trees recorded on the Larrakia region’s Register of Significant Trees, among them a burial tree at Mindil Beach (Mindil, meaning ‘the shoulder of an ancestor’ in Gulumoerrgin/Larrakia language), now standing beside the bustle of a popular tourist night market.
Light flickers from leaves stirred by the dry-season breeze, animating the installation. Shadows drift and dance, carrying the sacred tree’s spirit through the gallery.
The tamarind holds layered histories in the substance of its seeds. Carried across the sea, they took root on northern shores, becoming a marker of exchange and remembrance. At Mindil, the trees entwine with Larrakia burial traditions, still standing as protectors of ancestors.
Through the transformation of a colonial text into saplings, the work reflects on how the whispers of history are present in our landscape, which the land remembers, even if people forget.
