Queen's Birthday Honours: Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello awarded OAM for service to the creative and visual arts

The visual artist, writer, poet and photographer did not know anyone had nominated her and said it seemed strange "considering you just do what you do, doing what you feel is the right thing to do."

Her work in a range of areas has received recognition many times.

Literary awards she has received include the Henry Lawson Literary Award (1999), the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Literature (2000) and the Banjo Paterson Poetry Prize (2002).

Her achievements in the visual arts have also won her many awards.

These include the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (2013), the Award for Visual Arts, Canberra Critics Circle ( 2011 and 2013), and the ACT NAIDOC Artist of the Year (2009).

Along with her own art practice - "currently mainly in glass" - Ms Kemarre Martiniello began working in community and cultural development in the 1980s.

Ms Kemarre Martiniello was a member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Board, Australia Council for the Arts from 2001 to 2007 and its deputy chair from 2004 to 2007.

She is a member of the Craft ACT Advisory Board and a member of the Kingston Arts Precinct Steering Committee.

Her heritage is almost as diverse as her career.

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"There's a lot of mix in there," Ms Kemarre Martiniello said of her ancestry - Arrernte and Chinese on her father's side and English, Scottish and French on her mother's side - and "it all comes in" when she's creating art.

It was, she said, "a natural transition", when she began formal training, to pick up what she had been doing in childhood, creating three-dimensional work.

Although she graduated from the Canberra School of Art with a degree in sculpture in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade she had also studied photography there.

Having intended to undertake a graduate diploma to become a teacher at the University of Canberra, she instead worked at the university's Ngunnawal Centre Foundation Program, helping students who were "living in two cultures simultaneously".

Among other work helping Indigenous youth, she was coordinator of the Strong Identity, Strong Life: Indigenous Kids at Risk Project from 1999 to 2009.

She co-founded the ACT Indigenous Textiles and Glass Artists Group in 2003 and has been a mentor and project coordinator there.

While teaching Indigenous art history at the Canberra Institute of Technology, she said that she "also picked up some screenprinting".

Recently she has collaborated with Michael Sollis and the Griffyn Ensemble to create work merging music and visual art.

"I've also been writing quite a bit ... poetry, short fiction, essays," Ms Kemarre Martiniello said; she's also a mentor in the ACT Indigenous Writers Group.

These are just some of her accomplishments, artistic, literary and otherwise.

Perhaps the best summary of her life came when she said, "My practice is very much encouraging of everything."

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