Rae-Yen Song: Print Clan Artist in Residence 2024
The FInal artist in our 2024 residency programme, Rae-Yen Song, documents their month in the Print Clan studio translating their visual language of world building through reproductions, patterns and colours. Cumulating in printing 30 metres of silk - with no two sections alike - achieved through marbling different dyes and processes.
With their emphasis on versatility for every piece of fabric, it was a privilege to be a part of each evolving experiment as it took on a new purpose through different layers.
“November’s cold brought warm welcomes to Print Clan. The first week was spent experimenting with paint, drawing, color, and fabric scraps - learning the basics of textile screen printing.”
I explored sizes, tones, and layers, figuring out what was possible whilst getting excited and developing many ideas. I came into the residency with the concept of printing skin ~ tea fungus skin, the sea's skin, my grandma's skin ~ micro/macro scales and fractals of all kinds. These varying flakes are envisioned to feed and adorn the many costumed beasts that I'm currently thinking~making~dreaming towards future performances, armours and outings.
By weeks two and three, I was fully absorbed in the rhythms of repeat pattern printing. I hand-drew patterns
of sea ~ scale ~ skins, tiling them across a mix of home fabrics: inherited grandma silks, old cotton bedsheets, costumes from past projects, offcuts of a woven canvas architecture. I like the idea of my collected materials evolving, taking on new lives and layers beyond their original purposes, their surface area spreading across time and space.
I experimented with colours using pigmented FF binder and procion dyes, mainly on cottons and silks. I also tried altering some prints through natural dyeing, using turmeric and locally foraged berries. The repeats were pulled through colour blurrings and gradients created by splodged pigments directly onto the screen. The blended results were organic and unpredictable, forming swirls, blobs, and marbled patterns that looked like swimming ~ crawling ~ dancing beasties in the depths of fabric. Using both exposed screens and paper templates, I also printed onto tea fungus skins (SCOBY). The skins came in various shapes and textures - ghostly translucent roundels; brittle chips; thick, gelatinous, sticky rectangular rubbers. Black pigment worked best on these textures, maybe it's to do with the colour concentration on such a surface? In this way, there’s something quite stark and straightforward about printing on tea fungus skin and the parameters it’ll allow me to work within. These experiments have bubbled up some future ideas for layering and combining printed skins with fabrics, echoing patterns across different forms - scales on scales on scales.
In the final week, procion dyes won my heart with the way they steam deep into the fabric, becoming one with the very fibres... I printed a large-scale repeat of the sea ~ scale ~ skins pattern in 3 different sizes, sweeping across 30 metres of silk in total, using the full 10-meter table and three A0 screens. After printing, the fabric was steamed, washed, and set = the dye now woven in forever.
“The residency flew by, leaving me with new tools and methods for my hands and brain to tunnel into. All of these ways of working, tests, practices, experiments are destined to form into some sort of clothing, cover, or component - things to be worn, held, or used by family, extended kin, other beings, performers, musicians, guests and teachers. Shared skins, big bags, and warm bodies in a collective dream.”