JAZMINA CININAS

This frottage from 2024 is a continuation of the series of snake frottages that I have been creating since the COVID lockdowns. It has been designed so that there is the potential to link it up to pre-existing (and future) snake frottages to create one continuous serpent.

​The blue and black stripes are inspired by the sea krait, a venomous, semi-aquatic snake that can be found along the eastern coast of Australia. I am fascinated by the sea krait's liminal status as a creature that exists both on land and in water, possessing a paddle-like tail for swimming but needing to come ashore for its digestive and reproductive functions. Unlike fully aquatic sea snakes, alongside whom they co-evolved, sea kraits retain physiological vestiges of their land-based ancestors.  

I have been looking more into the mythology around snakes, in particular, the Lithuanian legend of Eglė the Serpent Queen. The sea krait seems a particularly apt motif for exploring the legend of a land-born woman who comes to live happily beneath the ocean with her snake groom, yet never quite loses the pull of her terrestrial birthplace. Eglė, in turn, offers a fitting motif for autoethnographic explorations of the diaspora experience.

In 2023 & 2024, I travelled to Japan for the first times, co-leading a study tour for RMIT School of Art university students. A mokuhanga (woodblock) workshop formed part of the study tour activities, and I thought I'd have a go too. I created a four-block image of my dog, Snukis. My husband had been sending me daily photos of him, so it was as though he was travelling with me. He is dressed in a red kerchief and carrying a key, inspired by the statues of sacred foxes, or inari, I had seen guarding the local Shinto temples. The key is to the back door of my home.

I thought I might be able to edition the woodblocks for the 3rd year exchange portfolio but, away from the mokuhanga sensei, I discovered just how fickle the medium is and was unable to achieve the desired level of consistency.  So I decided to try editioning the blocks as coloured pencil frottages instead. Just like any other print medium, I needed to proof the frottages to test colours, pencil brand and registration. The final edition was created using Prismacolor pencils, with a rubber stamp of a sakura (cherry) blossom - a souvenir from Kyoto - on the backs. These images include the test prints from the four blocks, extended with additional frottage from plastic waste. 

This is a second variation of the Australian Death Adder, once again drawing from my mother's enormous collection of low-relief "stuff".

This work draws on the correlations between waste plastics, such as that sourced from biscuit packaging and meat trays, and snakeskin. The 'weaving' pattern is loosely based on the markings that can be found on Australia’s Death Adder, one of the most poisonous snakes in the world. The work sets up a counterpart to the Baltic Adder, alluding to the blurring of cultural identities and reinvention of self that occurs with migrant diasporas; one needs to shed one's former identity for a new culture, but echoes of the former identity always remain. 

This work forms a companion piece to one of the earliest frottages that I created during the lockdown of 2020. It likewise makes use of the correspondence between my vintage kitchen implements and feathers. The cuckoo exists in both Europe and Australia – albeit different species of the bird. In both parts of the world, the hatchling ‘masquerades’ as another species, being raised by parents that are not its own, a foreigner in the nest where it was born. As such, the cuckoo serves as a metaphor for the conflicted place and identity of immigrant populations.

This work draws on the correlations between waste plastics, such as that sourced from biscuit packaging and meat trays, and snake skin. The 'weaving' pattern is loosely based on the markings that can be found in the European Adder, one of Lithuania's few indigenous snakes. The work alludes to the reinvention of self that happens with migrant diaspora's, where one needs to shed one's own identity, but it still forms a key part of one's new identity.

My mother not only has a vast selected of frottage-friendly carved, embossed and textured surfaces, she also has some wonderfully perforated implements, whose featheriness lend themselves to imagining fanciful birds. Once again, I return to the phoenix  motif for this flight of frottage fantasy. 

My mother has a lot of stuff. A. LOT. Most of it ornate or decorated in some way, shape or form. Since my eyes were opened to the wonder of frottage, I have gained a new appreciation for mum's 'stuff' and on a number of visits I have fantasised about a frottage 'residency'. My fantasy finally became a reality over the Christmas-New Year break of 2022-23 when I spent a week at my mother's idyllic country home. Armed with my trusty Derwents and mulberry paper, I got to work rubbing everything in sight, though I've barely scratched (or should that be rubbed?) the surface of the many surfaces at mum's. Once again, I returned to the snake motif, for which I am developing quite a fondness. Maybe it's because I was born in the Year of the Snake?...

Teaching printmaking online during lockdown to students trapped at home with no access to printing facilities is hard enough, but having to teach reduction linocut in these circumstances takes the challenge to a whole new level! Particularly as many of the students in the class were not printmaking majors and didn't have the cash to splash on expensive tools and ink for a one-off course. With them in mind, I wondered whether it might be possible to learn the reduction technique by using frottage rather than ink. One would still need to set up the registration block, and carve away each successive layer of lino only, rather than rolling up each subsequent layer with a different ink colour, one would take a rubbing with a different coloured pencil. It seemed feasible in theory but, never having come across an example, I felt a duty to attempt it myself, if I was going to ask my students to have a go. Much to my astonishment, not only did it work, it worked really well! (Yep, I printed a copy by hand as well. With a spoon. Should have made a frottage edition!)