27/06/24
listening to: the parachute ending - birdy nam nam
as is traditional, i survived the first heatwave of summer by focusing on a project. this time - a collaged majors-only tarot deck. i've collected the images here:
i love working with found images. it takes so much pressure off - if it sucks, well... i just didn't have the right materials, i did my best. but a lot of the time it doesn't suck. the limiting parameters of the medium make for a great creative challenge. brains love answering questions and "how can i make this work?"/"what can i make of this?" are extra satisfying to play with. add to that my autistic way of having fun (interacting with collection, in this case my collage stash, plus the general preoccupation with a special interest - tarot) and i've had a very decent few days.
i'm dipping in and out of Rachel Pollack's seventy eight degrees of wisdom and thought about this project when reading about the emperor. i've never met with the opinion prior to youtube/social media, but apparently "we all hate him". and there are definitely aspects of the emperor that are not great - like with any card - but do we really hate stability, having boundaries, having a vision, being responsible, exacting respect? compared with the creative free-flowing empress the emperor can be a bit of a bummer, but his structure is what gives shape to her abundance. it's like that deliberate creative challenge - fewer materials forcing better ideas. a tarot question giving shape to the answer from the myriad ways to interpret a bunch of cards. without the bounding box, the creativity spills aimlessly in all directions, which isn't always the desired result.