Rae-Yen Song (UK) works expansively across drawing, sculpture, costume, video, sound, performance and family collaboration to craft a personal visual landscape. Rae-Yen’s practice is informed by autoethnographic exploration: a self-reflective process which places personal experience at the heart of an attempt to understand wider cultural meaning. In a new commission for FACT, the artist offers a glimpse into a world constructed from inherited memories of a distant maternal grandmother. Within the work, a congregation of images, voices and characters join together to form a sanctuary: at once a space of loss and growth, reflection and speculation.
At the heart of the installation sits a piece of stained glass, an allegory of a highly personal family story. Surrounded by a meditative choir of ceramic guardians, a series of drawings serve as a blueprint for the ritual observation of this story.
This snapshot is part of an ongoing archival project for Rae-Yen - a long-term exploration of self-mythology as survival tactic - which connects sculptural practice to the digital realm through a series of portals. The stained glass window is one of these portals and can be activated using augmented reality (AR) when in the gallery.
