Never mistake a wolf for a fox

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This exhibition also went to UTS Gallery, and Artspace Adelaide. It featured the recent work of 12 invited Australian artists with a particular affinity with paper and continued the biennial series launched in 1995 as the Australian Paper Art Awards. Act XII celebrated diversity of practice in paper-based art and investigated notions of enactment and staging in the performing arts. Curator Lesley Harding; 'Dorothy Porter's libretto for the opera The Ghost Wife informs Mitch Lang's Serpents in My Garden, linocuts from Jazmina Cininas The Girlie Werewolf Project reflect on identity and disguise'.
Cininas shows female werewolf narratives which depict the chief protagonist as super-, rather than sub-human. In the wake of climate change and globalisation, the hybrid figure of the female werewolf offers an accessible visual model for multiple viewpoints and developing an empathetic engagement with the non-human world. Prints merge lupine features with those of a woman. The title refers to both the divergent biology, and the divergent cultural associations of wolves and foxes, specifically how this is reflected in attitudes towards women. Calling a woman a wolf carries quite different associations to calling her a fox. While the woman's eyes are technically a mask, it is ambiguous whether they obscure the wolf's eyes, or whether indeed they are emerging from within the wolf, creating a hybrid figure fluctuating between woman and wolf, yet remains both. The wolf can no more remove the woman's mask than the woman can remove the wolf's snout.

Also shown: 2003 Hutchins Art Prize exhibition, Hobart; International Print and Drawing Exhibition, Art and Cultural Centre, Silpakorn (03-4); Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle; Impressions on Paper Gallery, Canberra, 2006; PJP Centre for Australian Printmaking, 2007.