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.