Jazmina Cininas | Autumn Scene (2019-2022): lagerphones with stands from used bottle caps and salvaged timber. Dimensions variable. Photo: Andrius Lipšys | Courtesy the artist, National M.K. Čiurlionis Art Museum, Lithuania and Australian Galleries, Melbourne.
In an autoethnographic exploration of my hybrid Australian-Lithuanian cultural identity, I reimagine the lagerphone – a quintessentially Australian bush-band instrument made from used bottle caps and recycled timber – as Baltic nature motifs. The lagerphones are brought to life in performances by Pamesta Klumpė/The Lost Clog, a Melbourne-Lithuanian folk group of which I am a member.
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.
