JAZMINA CININAS

For a number of years now, I have admired the folkloric utilities covers on the streets of Estonia and Lithuania. I have been wanting to utilise them in a frottage project and finally had the opportunity in late May and June of 2026. My plan was to create 'street wear', i.e. a blouse and apron based on local national dress, utilising the motifs from the utilities covers. I took a day out of my residency at Umela in Estonia to take some pencil rubbings the streets of Tartu. It was not nearly long enough, and I only managed to make a start on my planned 'apron'. I had a little more time in Kaunas, however, where I was able to build on the apron a little, and frottage some pre cut pieces for a paper blouse. For easier (and safer) transport, I brought the unsewn pieces back to Melbourne to complete at home. The apron remains a project for another day (and an excuse to return to my beloved Baltics!)

In 2023 and 2024, I travelled to Japan for RMIT to co-lead study tours with School of Art students. One of the projects we set for the students was for them to bind and fill their own washi sketchbooks. with impressions from the study tour. I set myself the same challenge. Japan has the most extraordinary and diverse manhole and utilities covers and I became obsessed with capturing them in frottage. The resulting "Japan Street Art" book features 190 frottages. (There would have been more, except I left my first sketchbook on the shinkansen - never to be seen again!)

False Bride draws from the Lithuanian folk tale of Eglė the Serpent Queen, in which various animals, including a sheep,  are dressed as a bride to hoodwink the serpent groom.
The frottage (rubbing) is created from four plates using coloured pencils on kozo paper, editioned to 56 for a Rona Green exchange portfolio, Irrepressible. The folios will be exhibited at the Whitehorse Gallery in 2026 and the Goldfields Gallery in 2027. The frottage medium enabled me to indulge my irrepressible need to keep making, despite travelling around Australia in a caravan for twelve months in 2025.

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.