Unfinished MA

In 2017 I submitted my BA dissertation. The extract below is the introduction:

“This essay has came about from problems I am having with my own art practice. I am  working with witchery and magic, and I recently incorporated a card from the Tarot into a piece.  This meant I got a wild variety of interpretations of the work that I hadn’t anticipated.  The Tarot is a big topic. It has a long and variously fantastical history. There are many different  schools of thought on how it should be used. Many think that it is magical and that it can tell the  future. Others use it as a tool for counselling. There are disagreements in the Tarot reading  community about whether you interpret the cards using the guide book, your intuition or your  psychic powers. It is gendered in its use: most will think of a female fortune teller. It is gendered in  its expertise: most of the systems created around it were made by men. It has a huge non-binary and gender queer sub-culture. There is a story that goes with the Tarot that some see as a guide to self realisation, others see as a tale to help you remember the card meanings. Others relate the  archetypes in the cards to Jungian psychology. Some think witchcraft is evil. Some see witchcraft as the territory of silly pagans. As was said in my tutorial, using the images from the Tarot in my work  is similar to using images from the Bible: it is a topic that is loaded.  

In order to see how it could be done I started to research other artists who had used the Tarot in their work. I found this to be surprisingly difficult. I was interested in the topic so had assumed others  would be and that it would be easy to find a comprehensive guide. It seems that although individual  artists and exhibitions have been recorded and reviewed there was no writing about them as a  group. I decided to compile my research into just that.  

That does not mean that this work is comprehensive however. I seem to have collected works and  artists who, if not British, are English speaking. I have ignored artists who have simply made a  Tarot pack with their art on it. While there is some beautiful and meaningful work out there in the  form of Tarot packs, I am interested in those who are dealing with this loaded history that the Tarot  has. I have included every artist I have found that does this, and also included group exhibitions that are recreating a Tarot, as that is often related to the Tarot’s place in history and society.  I have started with a short introduction to the Tarot for those who are not familiar with it. I have  then divided the works I have some across into four sections: The Deck, The Dealer, The Reader  and The Wild Card.  

In The Deck I discuss artists who have recreated the deck for themselves. In this chapter are  Suzzane Treister with the Hexen 2.0 deck, Wayne Burrows with The Holcombe Deck and Francesca  Ricci’s Tabula Impressa. I have briefly looked at Salvador Dali’s deck, which is conventional but is  of note through being created by such a well known artist.  

The chapter The Dealer looks at group exhibitions that have recreated the Tarot deck. This includes  two British exhibitions Outrageous Fortune and What Does Our Future Hold? and the  video/animation deck that exists online A Mystical Staircase. 

The Reader deals with artists who perform Tarot card readings as part of their work. Here I discuss  Alejandro Jorodowsky, Leah Wolff and Mark Pillington.  

The Wild Card features artists that don’t use the actual pack of cards but use the imagery in their  work. Here are Nikki de Sainte Phalle’s Giardino de Tarocchi (a garden), Francis Mckee’s Even The Dead Rise Up (a work of written fiction) and AA Bronson and Scott Treleaven’s Cabine (a fortune tellers tent). “