The Girlie Werewolf Project
I never set out to make work about female werewolves. Too low brow. Too kitsch. The wolf motif first drew me for its autoethnographic reference to Lithuania (both my parents are Lithuanian). Specifically, the Iron Wolf, synonymous with the Lithuanian capital Vilnius and intrinsic to the city’s foundation legend. I loved the visual poetry of an armour-plated wolf but, if I’m completely honest, the legend is not that interesting and provides limited material, especially for a female artist.
In researching the broader symbolism of the wolf, I was struck by the parallels between representations of women and wolves throughout history. For example, the foundation legend of Romulus and Remus sees the she-wolf or lupa cast as ideal mother, nurturing and protecting her young (although lupa is also Latin slang for prostitute). The early modern era witnessed the emergence and convergence of the heretical female witch with the diabolical werewolf. The sudden spike of aristocratic, independent and accented female werewolves who wreaked their heinous destruction on men and children in Gothic literature coincided uncannily with the most heated episodes of the Suffragette movement. At the same time, Victorian diagnoses of female delusion and ‘hysteria’ were linked to lunacy or moon-induced madness. More recent narratives, notably Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber from the 1970s and the cult Canadian Ginger Snaps trilogy from the early 2000s, explicitly link the lunar cycle to a woman’s monthly cycle. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s New Age manifesto, Women Who Run With the Wolves, encouraged women to embrace their lupine selves at a time when the wolf itself was being re-cast as a poster child for environmental causes. The female werewolf offered the most succinct motif through which to encapsulate and distil the myriad intersections of woman and wolf, if I just gave myself permission to go there.
The intersection of women and wolves informed my Masters project (1999-2002), the first time I directly depicted female werewolves, rather than alluding to them from the sidelines. It was also my first serious foray into reduction linocuts, taking the form of ten small works known collectively as Lycanthropy Survival Hints. Encouraged by the surprisingly positive response to both the linocuts and the subject matter, I embarked on larger, more complex prints in tandem with more explicit representations of female lycanthropy, still largely autoethnographic at that stage. Coming to the realisation that, much like the legend of the Iron Wolf, I’m not that interesting either, I turned to the diverse manifestations of lupine femininity throughout history, giving rise to the idea of a Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame. By the time I commenced my PhD in 2005, any inhibitions I had about depicting female werewolves had well and truly been put to bed. Shortly after, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series launched a paranormal tsunami. I suddenly found myself in a zeitgeist, the werewolf bandwagon at full throttle.
In creating my portraits, I modelled myself not so much on other visual artists but rather on author Angela Carter, specifically her treatment of Red Riding Hood in her anthology of re-imagined fairytales, The Bloody Chamber. Like Carter, who drew on archaic versions of the fairytale, I hunted down werewolf lore and imagery that pre-dated the full moons and infected bites of Hollywood, returning to a time of werewolf potions, enchanted girdles, lycanthropic inheritance, rituals surrounding lycanthropic rivers and forests, werewolf weddings and winter solstices, for clues as to how the female werewolf might be re-imagined for a contemporary audience.
Alongside the portraits, I provided explanatory plaques that detailed the histories, narratives and symbolism within each image, drawing on sources as diverse as early modern witch-hunt treatises and broadsheets, folklore, medical and psychiatric literature, gothic and paranormal fiction, cinema and television, comic books and popular culture. I hoped to shine a spotlight on narratives of lupine femininity that had so often been left in the shadows of their male counterparts. My intention was also to present as broad a visual vocabulary of the hirsute sisterhood as possible, drawing from the aesthetics and motifs of the various sources and centuries, to offer an antidote to the reductive Hollywood stereotype of the female werewolf as monster, relegated to B-grade horror and paranormal kitsch.
Following the PhD, I was keen to focus on manifestations of lycanthropy from the Baltic States. While I wish I could claim the honour for Lithuania, I took sisterly pride in learning that Estonia is the world capital for female werewolves. This northernmost of the Baltic States even boasts a memorial to a female werewolf, Kongla Ann, in the small village of Viru-Nigula. Imagine my delight on learning I’d been granted a funded, three-month residency the Estonian Printing and Paper Museum (now called TYPA) in Tartu!
This was a dream residency, custom made for me. The museum publicist, Mana, was more than happy to translate Kongla Ann’s Old Estonian court transcripts for me, her father having been the principal lobbyist for the memorial. I met with local folklorist Merili, whose articles on runaway werewolf brides in Saaremaa had first alerted me to Estonia’s rich female werewolf legacy. I saw the recently released November, based on Andrus Kivirähk’s novel Rehepapp ehk November (not yet translated into English), about the lupine Liina, now my favourite female werewolf movie of all time. (Like Carter, Kivirähk re-imagines arcane folklore for contemporary times). I had a beer at the Hell Hunt pub in Tallinn which logo features a naked blonde riding a smiling wolf, ‘hell hunt’ meaning ‘tender wolf’ in Estonian. The museum itself was filled with working printing presses of all eras and forms and drawers of wooden and metal type in fabulous retro fonts, some of which I was able to incorporate into my portrait of Kongla Ann. I was in heaven. I could never have imagined that my time in Tartu would begin setting the sun on my girlie werewolves and reduction linocuts.
