Kee-On-Ee was a trail blazer for her kind

Research Background
"Kee-On_Ee was a trailblazer for her kind" is part of an ongoing investigation into novel representations of female lycanthropy through the reduction linocut medium. The work responds to the 1913 film, The Werewolf, which featured a woman in the title role and was also the first known cinematic depiction of a werewolf. The film was lost in a warehouse fire along with the iconography that would have identified women as having a significant role in pioneering werewolf cinema. The casting of a female werewolf as the lead character in a film is significant at a time when women's suffrage was still hotly contested and social Darwinism was used to bolster colonialist rhetoric of racial supremacy.
Research Contribution: The artwork draws on known details of the film, such as the Navajo nationality of the female protagonists, the dissolve effect that was used for the transformation scenes, the identity of the lead actresses and film company title (Bison) to re-instate the 'lost' iconography of the film as a context for examining broader social issues of the time. The inherently transformative reduction linocut medium is pushed through unconventional inking practices such as blended rolls and printing light over dark, thereby extending possibilities for the medium to address notions of transition. "Kee-On_Ee was a trailblazer for her kind" contributes to a larger body of work, known collectively as "The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame," that address the following research questions: Who might fulfil the cultural and/or historical criteria necessary to be identified as a female werewolf?How might one visually represent the attributes that identify an individual as a female werewolf? What are some of the ways in which changing representations of female werewolves throughout history serve as barometers for cultural change? Research SignificanceThe artwork was shortlisted for the 2012 Silk Cut Award for Linocuts, the premier national award for the linocut