Lucky Tiger by Jayes Caitlin

I’ve been a printmaker for 15 years. What began as a passion for learning how to print grew into a career making concert posters, and eventually into a fine art practice centered on abstraction. I have worked between the worlds of art and design, building a life and career around print. Today I run a commercial print studio where I teach workshops, offer open studio access, and provide bespoke print services alongside my own active art practice. Printmaking touches my life every day. My studio practice has grown out of this experience. I make silkscreened abstract prints and posters for collectors and clients, while maintaining a generative fine art practice based on hand collage and digital design. I build compositions by hand using colored cardstock, fragments of my own drawings, and pieces of older prints. I then digitally separate the layers and print them one color at a time. This process has become cyclical. A collage becomes a print; the print becomes material again. I cut it apart, rearrange the pieces, and build a new composition, which becomes a new print. I made a deliberate decision to stop using found imagery in my collage work. Instead, the materials come from my own practice or from pure color. This has created a growing vocabulary of recurring marks, textures, shapes, and patterns. Familiar fragments return in new combinations, creating a visual history that accumulates from one work to the next. Printmaking is essential to this process because it does more than reproduce my collages—it changes them. Each printed layer introduces shifts in texture, color, scale, and registration, creating new visual information that I can respond to. The print becomes both an endpoint and a starting point. I’m interested in this ongoing cycle of making, dismantling, and remaking. The final prints are records of that process: each one contains fragments of what came before while becoming the raw material for what comes next. Through printmaking, my practice continually generates its own source material, allowing the work to develop through repetition, accumulation, and transformation.