JAZMINA CININAS

The ever-changing figure of the female werewolf highlights the ongoing currency of this quintessential boundary rider as a barometer for shifting intersections between femininity, morality and the natural world in the popular imagination.

Cininas is fascinated by the multiple incarnations of this hirsute shape-shifter, from the Early Modern Era heretic werewolf/witches, through to ‘celebrity’ hairy wolf girls, to contemporary incarnations in film, fiction and popular culture.

The inherently transformative reduction linocut, whereby the plate is progressively cut into and destroyed while the print correspondingly becomes more complete, informs Cininas' medium of choice in these investigations. Repeatedly casting her net over the broad spectrum of female lycanthropy, She accesses a wide pool of sources while acknowledging her debt to earlier printed and visual representations of the mythical figure. In doing so, Cininas hopes to offer a counterpoint to the male gendered ‘celebrity’ of the werewolf, and draw attention to the longstanding (and often long suffering) history of women within lycanthropy.

Jazmina Cininas is a practicing visual artist, curator, arts writer and lecturer in Fine Art Printmaking who has exhibited regularly for over a decade both nationally and internationally. Her work is held in numerous state and national collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Australian National Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Alice Springs Art Foundation, Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Silk Cut Foundation, Edith Cowan University, City of Banyule and the City of Fremantle collections.

Jazmina’s 2002 Masters exhibition "The Girlie Werewolf Project" and her current PhD project "The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame: historical and contemporary figurations of the female lycanthrope" reflect a long-standing fascination with representations of female werewolves as reflections of social change. As such, Jazmina’s research draws on a wide range of interrelated sources such as historical records of psychiatric and criminal cases, documented witch hunts and werewolf trials and other cultural references such as literature, folklore, cinema and the internet.

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