JAZMINA CININAS

In the Lithuanian legend of Eglė the Serpent Queen, a young woman removes her clothing to go for a swim, returning to find that a snake has taken up residence in her blouse. The snake will only return her blouse (and her modesty) to Eglė if she agrees to marry him and go to live with him beneath the sea. This work is based on the idea of Eglės blouse. I began the printing using Estonian flowers while on my Umela artist residency at the end of May 2026. The flower pounding continued in Kaunas in June with Lithuanian wildflowers, while the final printing took place back in my Northcote studio, Melbourne. Like Eglė, this blouse shares a story of migration, travelling from its birthplace to a distant, alien land and environment. 

Following two trips to Japan in 2023 and 2024, co-leading study tours for RMIT School of Art students, I became aware of the Japanese technique of hammering flowers onto cloth to release their natural dyes, known as tataki zome. This technique seemed like a natural fit in my creative evolution towards more environmentally sustainable art practices, and also opened up the possibility of incorporating local flora into my artworks while travelling, particularly the wildflowers that filled the fields and forests of the Baltic States, without violating Australia's biosecurity laws. My first forays into the process, however, were a lot more local, utilising flowers from the streets surrounding my home in Northcote, and from my mother's garden in rural Woodleigh. 
I later learned that the paper needed to be pretreated with an alum mordant, so the colours are already beginning to fade. 

These images are all from my Northcote studio (Melbourne, Australia) and utilise flowers from the local gardens and street plantings. I was curious to see whether I could work with the flowers to create abstract colour fields (in traditional tataki zome the goal is to preserve the form of the flower in the final print as faithfully as possible), and to test the results using an etching press in place of a hammer. The first trials were promising, though turned out to be much more labour intensive than anticipated. (It seems I can't help myself!) They were also on untreated washi, so the colour is likely to fade before long.
For the next attempts, I was sure to pre-treat the paper with alum solution. I also formalised the composition by drawing up a grid, referencing traditional weaving patterens. I was aiming for the soft grids of the pink mohair blanket I won in a raffle as a child, and which I always associated  with my grandmother and home comfort. 
 

In May 2026, I travelled to Prangli, Estonia, to be the inaugural Artist in Residence at Umela, located within the storybook forest home of Kalli and Ove Kalde. The residency lasted an all-too-brief two weeks, but I was able to take advantage of the etching press and springtime flowers to work on an 'edition' of botanical prints, inspired by local folk costume traditions. Each morning, I would pick fresh flowers from the garden, forest and country lanes, then run them through the press to release their natural dyes onto Japanese washi while being serenaded by birdsong. I had pretreated the washi with alum (aluminium sulphate) prior to travel. The residency concluded with a sauna party in Kalli and Ove's ancient sauna, complete with plunges into their private lake, and a pop up exhibition in the studio, including work that I had retrieved the previous day from my exhibition at the Estonian Literary Museum and Folk Archive. 
Suur tänu Kalli ja Ove for making me feel so welcome in your beautiful home and enabling such a dreamlike residency experience. I will definitely be back!