Hi, and welcome. My name is Majena, or Jena for short. I feel always transient. I was born in Australia and now live halfway between there and the south of France in a rural district under a beautiful mountain range that has sheltered both bone goddesses and mammoths across millennia.

I am a researcher, maker and writer. I work within the monstrous, the unsaid and the said in women’s voice and language frames.

As I research, write, stitch, read, research some more and ruminate, as I move between genres, borders and mediums. I write (ooze) hybrid, speculative, experimental, sound-based, ficto-critical texts that firmly cross genres and disciplines. I feel most at home in the feminist avant-garde poetics writers and theory mob, but also in mystics, shapeshifters and alchemical lares. I have a transgressive impulse; I use surrealist frames of thinking. I am interested in unnatural narratives. And what they spell out.

Along with my love and championing of women's lost voices and unacknowledged knowledge. I champion the wyrd.

I have done extensive research into prehistory, … ritual, women’s herstory, women’s monologues, testimony, love language, and love; mystics, and ecstatic utterances, the writer Gertrude Stein, and matriarchal underpinnings in language (MFA, MPhil and PhD). I write odd little things and even odder very long things. I have a novel in my bottom draw, that’s titled A Biography of Light, narrated by two women who discuss it in its various guises. I am presently working on a text featuring a mouthless woman detective, a detector, and her sassy speech device, who go out searching and listening and looking for something quite peculiar. 

This here is a collection of pieces from my embroidery box, my writing works, film and drawing studio.

I stitch works that have to do with voice. And I champion stitchery as “an-other,” OTHER, oracular - to sit equally alongside language and the canon of order. I work in series, which often reflect on past series. All my workings have equal value to me. But I am especially interested in pairing the MONSTROUS within words and stitchery.

I am interested in and read widely into feminist theory, listening for the sound of it (Ruth Salvaggio), and follow the rhizomic threads (Deluze) ... I like undoing and rewinding the threads of women's speech as it was depicted or silenced in early-early, in Greek and before (Gimbutas mythology, folklore, linguistics, and archaeology), and in other 'early' myths, and reimagining … and in reanimating these earlier forms and sources. And where I can’t find them, I invent (Wittig - "Or, Failing That, Invent"). I'm interested in the lost, the unsaid, the unutterable, the refused, the jammed cacophony, the denied voice at the margins …

and as I said the MONSTROUS …

Think … Medusa, Grendel’s mother, the Harpies, Sybils, etc.