Earlier today I saw a man pull a cigarette out of his pocket and place it between his lips with a ritual smoothness. I was walking to the Glasgow Subway and there was a beat in which I considered stopping to watch but my feet kept on moving and it was only in my periphery that I saw him catch his mistake. The cigarette was the wrong way round and he was singeing the filter.
I derived such a nugget of momentary joy from this brief encounter, the barest of images in such a slight glance. I find these chance scenes of life compel a documentation within me.
In the ditch that is a Glaswegian winter I began to take pictures of banal, ridiculous and accidental sightings. Anything and everything which dragged the ripple of pleasant emotions through me. Be it discarded fruit, a defaced sign, or a bird with an obscene amount of bread in its beak. I did not conceive of these images as an art form, they were part of a method of survival first. Twenty-two photos that spoke to me while my art practice, tricky creature that it is, refused to utter a sound. Now I lay them between these pages, translated and transformed by my hand in pencil, ink, and charcoal into the Major Arcana of the tarot deck.
They sorted themselves into this journey, the shape, insisting, that while I may not have known it when I found them, they were the cards. A chemical reasoning rather than rational or literal designations as I moved with the intuitive sense of each image as its own card. From this, I submerged myself into the associated feelings of a ‘traditional’ reading as a way to feel my way into the methods of drawing required for a hearty translation.
There is nothing prescriptive within these pages. This is not a ‘how-to guide’ in reading the cards. What follows will be ruminations on experiences, a written response to the moments which sparked something. You may wish to derive a meaning from the stories I tell, a way to relate to the cards and use them for yourself. But, I want you to realise, the ability to read the cards is already within you. I believe this to be a faithful choice to the workings of the Tarot, as the tool of the book with prescribed meaning finds itself in the way to reading the cards as the web they are meant to be. That understanding – you can find it without me and by doing it that way it means something. Not something as in the opposite of nothing but something – intangible and sidestepping lexical definition.
This booklet is an optional appendage. Delving into ‘thingness’ – a gathering of time and an assemblage of objects. I know that the form of the Tarot is a potent vehicle for the writing which is the reanimation of my artistic practice, but I am not using these pages to justify that choice to you. Rather I am letting you just that bit closer to the journey which made this clear to me.
I wish you the best in finding your own reversed cigarettes, stumbling into spellbound sparks of life. They are out there, waiting for you, igniting against odds through the darkness.