Jazmina Cininas | Trans Baltic-Tasman Crossing (2018). Artist book with re-purposed vintage cover and collage from redundant Estonian, Lithuanian and Australian encyclopaedias, used business envelopes. 21 x 14 x 2.3cm (closed). | Courtesy the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne.
This Coptic stitch book is an ode to my ancestral roots in the Baltics and the hold the region still has on my cultural and emotional identity. The work taps into the mythology surrounding the lure of ocean voyages to allude to refugee migrations from the Baltics to the Antipodes in the wake of WWII, that also often entailed an uncertain journey from the known to the unknown. The vintage collage material was sourced during an artist residency at the Estonian Printing and Paper Museum, Tartu, in 2017, and has been supplemented with used business envelopes from my letter box, bridging Australian and Baltic motifs and references.
Jazmina Cininas is an Australian artist whose work has been shortlisted for over 80 art prizes and acquired by over 40 public collections in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia and Museums Victoria. International collections include the Lithuanian National Art Museum, Estonian Printing & Paper Museum and MARKK Museum of Ethnology, Hamburg. For close to three decades, she has lectured in printmaking and artist books at RMIT School of Art, Melbourne, where
she completed her PhD, The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame, in 2014.
While best known for her reduction linocut portraits of female werewolves, Jazmina’s practice has recently expanded to include intricate artist books from discarded print ephemera, sculptural lagerphones from used bottle caps and recycled timbers as well as pencil frottage from found surfaces in a conscious move towards environmentally sustainable art practices, intersecting with an auto-ethnographic exploration of her Lithuanian-Australian cultural identity.
