Six months ago I was invited to Torino, Italy, to take part in a project called Luck Upside Down/Quando La Fortuna É Capolavolta at Studio Abra. I was asked to show some of the cards that were made for When We See You, as part of a larger project that featured a group exhibition and a lively programme of workshops and talks, curated by Marta Montoni and Paolo Volpe.

I spent two weeks wandering Torino feeling spellbound by the city of the Devil, as it’s known. Torino is one of the world capitals of the occult and once home to Italy’s royal family. It’s a city of decaying beauty surrounded by silver blue mountains and punctuated by an impossibly rising star -ascending from the Mole Antonelliana building housing the National Cinema Museum. 

The exhibition opened on the night of a lunar eclipse. In Vedic astrology, solar and lunar eclipses are seen to symbolise the opening of a dragon’s mouth and the whiplash of its tail. The dragon’s mouth, Rahu, opens a portal with a solar eclipse while Ketu, the dragon’s tail, closes it with a lunar eclipse. Potent signs of change, destruction, beginning and ending abound in times of eclipses. 

This time in the world feels increasingly volatile. Beyond the horizon of the silver blue mountains there is violence and suffering. I hear an aid worker on my Instagram story describe an ‘avalanche of suffering’ descending from the Israeli bombing of Gaza. When Israel suffered a surprise attack from Hamas on the borders of the city several weeks before, there was a warning that the Israeli response would be disproportionate – but the ferocity of the bombing seems to have shocked even seasoned analysts. Outside my apartment, I see the words ‘PALESTINA LIBERA’ scrawled in big letters with spray paint.

I started When We See You in 2021 in Glasgow, in the midst of a third national lockdown due to the global pandemic of Covid-19. I had been learning about Tarot cards since 2019 but the space and boredom of lockdown encouraged a deeper connection to the cards. I began pulling cards and writing advice from them to myself daily and some of these texts became blog posts. I wanted to draw the images to understand them better, in particular the Tarot de Marseille deck, and I found drawing brought a more intimate, embodied understanding of these mysterious images. 

The decision to make art about the cards with collaborators came spontaneously. I remember seeing some handmade paper that Connie Hurley, soon to be my first collaborator, had made on Instagram. She had drawn a border around the middle and marked the uneven edges, leaving an empty blank space. I thought they seemed like little cards waiting to be filled in. We met over Zoom and I asked her if she could make some more paper and interpret the borders leaving a space in the middle. We pulled three cards together: The Chariot, Strength, and The Magician. We created the cards over post, with handmade paper and colouring pencils – soft edges and uneven borders. 

Working in another’s material and idea allowed for unexpected juxtapositions. At the opening in Torino a woman asks to speak to me. She is Ukrainian and sees that the ‘World’ card, made with Lisa Rytterlund, has the Ukrainian word for ‘World’ – світ – is inscribed on the card. The card was made in ceramic by Lisa, in the image of a Molotov cocktail.

In spring of 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine had began, and Lisa wanted to acknowledge the precarious state of the world when we re-created a card about the ‘World’. The Ukrainian woman tells me she assists the army in radar detection, and that she is on a break in Torino visiting friends. After interrogating our motivations a little, she tells me seeing the word for world in her Ukrainian language as she entered the exhibition was an unexpected emotional surprise, that it made her feel seen and connected to the art – she thanked us for thinking of Ukraine.

Art communicates in mysterious ways and its effect can not be controlled. In the Summer of 2021 I made the Lovers and Tower card with Tamara Macarthur. I made the cards around the time of a powerful eclipse in Gemini, and met Ruby, who within six months would leave Glasgow and move to Norway with me. You could say the Lovers and Tower together could be a portent for a life-changing relationship. I found drawing cards and turning them into an artwork has a strangely affective quality to my life, like the essence of the cards begins to generate a new reality. Anyway, since making those cards with Tamara nothing has been the same since.

I find myself within another eclipse portal. I’m feeling reflective of this project and of beginnings and changes and endings. Leaving my Masters course last year, the last work of art I made was the Moon card with Clea Fillipa. My time was ending in school, and I was feeling misty and tired. I had been drawn to Clea’s practice since arriving in Bergen for its watery and metallic materiality -as well as a kind of alchemical elemental quality. 

Clea offers The Moon card to be drawn on a silver steel plate, with an aluminum sheet seeming to reflect water. I scratched into the resistant plate for 3 days – finding the image in the darkness of the metal. In my own life it feels like I’m entering a world of darkness and uncertainty after a period of study and stability – the card is my entry point and the Moon becomes my guide for navigating the unknown. 

In Torino I’m encouraged by my hosts to run a workshop where we can make cards together, by way of introducing the project. Rachele and Marta take me to a scrap yard where we haggle for different materials, we find cardboard sheets, gold stars, playing cards, buttons and forgotten toys. 

Back at the workshop I pull cards for groups of two – a Major Arcana card for each pair. They are encouraged to write what they see before making a card together, drawing or collaging in any way they like, filling in one half, and handing it over to their partner. It’s chaotic and silly but everyone focuses on making their cards, choosing what imagery to pay attention to, and how to leave space for their partner. After several hours we have a motley crew of stars, horses, magicians, and towers. 

After three years working with the cards in this way, it feels like it might be time to transition. I’m not sure if this is the end of When We See You, but maybe it’s a pause to the project. Unsure, I throw the IChing and ask for guidance – if it’s time to end the project. I get hexagram number 58, The Joyous, Lake. It shows two mirroring symbols, seeming to be two lakes reflecting one another. 

As cards and hexagrams are want to do – it doesn’t really give me a direct answer about what to do. Perhaps the lake reflecting back what it sees speaks to a harmonious sense of completion, of fullness. Perhaps it’s speaking to the nature of the project, of reflection, of seeing another in a card. One passage from the commentary jumps out at me; 

Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalzing force. It becomes so only through stimulating contact with congenial friends with whom one holds discussions and practices application of the truths of life. In this way learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness whereas there is always something ponderous and one sided to the self taught. 

Why do we draw something? Why do we share it with others? One reason might be because we want to understand something and communicate it. Collaboration brings this communication to places that alone, we would not be able to reach and that in the end, would not be as fulfilling. And maybe trying to understand something is to pay attention to something, and paying attention is really caring about something. Paying attention to each other and the world around us, maybe that’s why we make art? 

We leave Torino early one morning and fly over the silver blue mountains. I leave and I know my time here has changed me. A star reaches for the sky suspended as high as it will go. The dragon’s mouth opens and its tail brings down another tower. The effort to order the world, our lives and our art-projects is bound to fail -when one thing ends another begins. All we have is each other; affection and relation in the spiral of ceaseless change.