Jazmina Cininas | Erzsebet was frequently mistaken for a vampire (2011). Reduction linocut. Image: 37 x 28cm. Paper: 43 x 34.5cm. | Courtesy the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne.
Erzsébet Báthory, who is mentioned in Sabine Baring Gould’s The Book of Werewolves (1865), was a 16th century Hungarian noblewoman who spent the last four years of her life bricked-up within her castle in Čachtice, Slovakia. Legend has it that Erzsébet tortured and killed 600 virgins in order to bathe in their blood, believing it kept her skin youthful. It is rumoured that the countess was followed around by a she wolf and that the three ‘prongs’ that form the letter ‘E’ in her family seal represent wolf’s teeth. Julie Delpy, the model for this portrait, directed herself as the Hungarian noblewoman in the 2009 film, The Countess, and also starred in An American Werewolf in Paris (1997).
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.
