Hi, welcome … my name is Majena Mafe or Jena for short, I was born in Australia and now live in the south of France in a rural district under a beautiful mountain range that has been the shelter for bone goddesses and mammoths across millennia.

I name myself a maker and writer. I work within the monstrous, the unsaid and the said in women’s language. And in the sound of women’s language. And in that, “love.”

I write, stitch, read, research, and ruminate. 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 feel, at home in the feminist avant-garde poetics mob, but also in mystics and shapeshifters and alchemical lares, I have a transgressive impulse, I use surrealist frames of thinking. I am interested in un-natural narratives. And what they spell out. Along with my love and championing women's voices, 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 long long things. I have a novel in my bottom draw, that’s a Biography of Light, written 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/looking for something quite peculiar. 

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 cannon of order. I make work in series, that 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.

In between I make odd things.

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 the voice at the margins …

and as I said the MONSTROUS …

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