JAZMINA CININAS

The book is based on the Lithuanian legend of Eglė (Spruce), a young woman who catches the eye and the heart of the Serpent King. She reluctantly agrees to marry him. Her family do not wish her to go and try to fool the serpents by dressing first a goose, then a sheep, then a cow in her wedding dress, but each time a cuckoo alerts the serpents to the deception. The marriage finally takes place and Eglė goes to live with the Serpent King beneath the ocean, discovering that he is, in fact, a handsome youth with a grand palace. When, many years later, she returns to visit her father’s home with her own children, Eglė’s brothers take their scythes and slay the Serpent King and all the snakes. Heartbroken, Eglė transforms herself and her children into trees.

The form of the book is based on vetrungės, decorative weathervanes specific to the coastal regions of Lithuania. Vetrungės featured on traditional sailing boats and served to identify individual owners, often including motifs specific to individual histories.

This Coptic stitch book is an ode to my ancestral roots in the Baltics and the hold the region still has on my cultural and emotional identity. The work taps into the mythology surrounding the lure of ocean voyages to allude to refugee migrations from the Baltics to the Antipodes in the wake of WWII, that also often entailed an uncertain journey from the known to the unknown. The vintage collage material was sourced during an artist residency at the Estonian Printing and Paper Museum, Tartu, in 2017, and has been supplemented with used business envelopes from my letter box, bridging Australian and Baltic motifs and references.

This tunnel book is an ode to my ancestral roots in the Baltics and the hold the region still has on my cultural and emotional identity. The work taps into an underlying longing to ‘return’ to the motherland, despite being born and growing up in Australia, by harnessing the mythology surrounding sirens and the lure of ocean voyages. The vintage collage material was sourced during an artist residency at the Estonian Printing and Paper Museum, Tartu, in 2017, and has been supplemented with used business envelopes from my letter box, bridging Australian and Baltic motifs and references. The images above show individual layers from the book.

The Slippery She-Wolf Dreams in Snakish was created in Estonia while Tartu Artist in Residence, utilising collage elements sourced from the Estonian Printing & Paper Museum, 2017. The book is my response to female werewolf lore and folklore that I encountered in the course of the residency, including Andrus Kivirähk's fabulous novel, The Man Who Spoke Snakish​. 

The vintage book cover and collage material were sourced during an artist residency at the Estonian Printing and Paper Museum, Tartu, in 2017. The book cover had already been emptied of its contents, so I imagined new contents based simply on the cover imagery. (Kärp means Stoat in Estonian). I was struck by the visual correspondences between the hills on the cover illustration and the curving back of a mink illustration in a redundant Estonian natural history book, and conceived a narrative in which the stoat was both the subject and the context of the book. The resulting imagery comprises a landscape formed by stoats and similar animals, inhabited by progressively smaller stoats and similar animals.

4 degrees of love in the Baltics was created from Farmi and Rokiškis milk cartons collected over the course of a three months in Estonia while Tartu Artist in Residence. Decorative motifs were cut from the cartons and arranged to suggest Baltic jewellery uncovered in archaeological digs, before being stitched into place on their paper panels.