Jazmina Cininas | Christina sleeps on both sides of Grandma’s bed (2010). Reduction linocut. Image: 53 x 72cm. Paper: 76.5 x 91.5cm | Courtesy the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne.
Prior to Charles Perrault’s publication of Le Petite Chaperon Rouge in his 1697 collection of French fairy tales, the tale of a little girl in red who meets a wolf on the way to her grandmother’s existed as a peasant tale, with possible roots in the eleventh century. In one version of the tale, the wolf tricks Red into eating her grandmother. The scene appears in David Kaplan’s 1997 short film, Little Red Riding Hood, which visually references the artist Gustave Doré’s 1865 image of Red in bed with the wolf, as does my homage. Christina Ricci, the model for both the wolf and Red in this image, plays the title role in Kaplan’s film and also plays suspected werewolf, Ellie Myers, in Wes Craven’s 2005 film, Cursed.
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.
