a conversation with emily carding

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ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Why the tarot? Why did you choose to get involved with these images and all what they represent?

EMILY CARDING: Why the Tarot? My fascination with Tarot began at a very early age. Before I was born, my mother had been interested in Tarot and the Occult, not in a serious way, but enough to have a Rider Waite deck and a couple of interesting books. Although she stopped when she married my father, the books remained on the shelves with their fascinating titles- amongst them, ‘The Devil’s Picturebook’ by Paul Huson. Of course the fact that as a child I was not allowed to look at them made them all the more fascinating! I used to sneak peeks at these forbidden words and images.

When I was older, late teens, she gave me her old Rider Waite, along with stories of an adventure with a Ouija Board and awful things happening at her school to the people involved! Indeed, the deck was rather malefic in its portents, and despite many cleanising attempts I didn’t use it for readings, though I kept it for many years.

After having interests in spirituality and magick from an early age, i found myself free to pursue this when I left home to go to University, and right from the beginning I was doing readings for my fellow drama students with my first deck, the Hallowquest. Here was a deck so unlike the RWS, (which it took me a long time to learn to appreciate), and one in which the artwork seemed to speak to me personally. From my knowledge of Arthurian Mythos but also a strongly developed visual imagination, I found I could interpret the images on an intuitive level. Other early decks that spoke to me in this way were the Sacred Rose and the Ancestral Path.

Through the years, Tarot has been a part of a larger magical and spiritual path, and very natural for me to be drawn to, as it combined my love of things mystical with an appreciation of art and symbolism.

I had always painted since childhood, for pleasure, so when I became a mother and a career in Theatre was no longer an option, I decided to make a career from my art. Combined with more time and opportunity to train and explore within my magickal and spiritual path, creating my own Tarot was a natural step towards this. Then I just got in everyone’s face with it until I started to be noticed! The fascination with the Tarot and the energies behind it is a journey which gets deeper and deeper and more fascinating with time. Looking for new ways to portray those energies and symbols is an addictive compulsion!

Interestingly, returning to the old RWS of my mother’s, I decided to finally destroy the deck and burnt it in a ritual, one card at a time. Not only was it shortly after that that I started to recieve inspiration to create my own deck, but at the same time my mother revived her interest in the Tarot. I now believe that it was her blocking her natural magical leanings for all those years that caused the negative energy around the cards, and that burning them with respect in a sacred fire caused a release of energy and inspiration! (Don’t try this at home though, kids)

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Burning the deck, wasnt that a little bit harsh? Which card did you burn first?

EMILY CARDING: True. But it was pretty. The coloured ink made lovely green flames, and it was all done very respectfully!

Gosh, which card first? I wish I could remember. As Granny Weatherwax would say, we’ve all passed a lot of water since then.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: There are two things I wonder about, regarding the creation of your own deck. First, what was missing in the pre-existing decks that made you feel the need to create your own? Second, I would like to know more about the dialogue between what you brought to the table and what was there before. In other words: how much can one add to what the tarot is, and how much should one keep from what the tarot was, in order to innovate without loosing the tarot’s identity?

EMILY CARDING: Well, let’s not forget that the first deck I painted was actually The Tarot of the Sidhe, not the Transparent. I think because the Transparent was my first widely-released deck, that’s what is seen to have come first, whereas the complete Sidhe is only just now being released. So really when I was first creating a deck, it wasn’t a huge innovation- at least not as obviously as the Transparent was.

And in fact none of my decks have been created as the result of finding anything lacking in existing Tarot- far from it! Tarot of the Sidhe was created out of the urge to explore the symbolism of Tarot from the inside-out, in a way an educational process for me as creator. Up to that point I had been largely an intuitive reader, and the traditional meanings had never truly clicked in my brain. It was also more importantly an act of spiritual service, to create or strengthen the bridge between this realm and the otherworld. So the creative process was that I would meditate on each card’s meaning, studying both Rider Waite and Thoth-based decks, (not really the Marseilles tradition), and the Sidhe would send me an image which I would do my best to interpret. The aim was to create a deck which others would be able to read the way I first learnt to read- with symbols that spoke directly to their subconscious. Now I’m not saying that other decks don’t do that, but I have the need to act upon inspiration when it comes.

And really that’s how the Transparent Tarot came about. It was literally a bolt of inspiration from the blue, which woke me up in the middle of the night and made me sat bolt upright! I had wanted to create something that hadn’t been done, it’s true…again, not for anything lacking in what already existed, but just to try and find some uncharted territory. Perhaps I’m a Tarot explorer? (Aren’t we all?) I had NO idea that an idea would come to me that was as radically different from anything that had been attempted before! Then after the idea, of course, comes the technical process of making it work. A part of that was certainly considering what needed to be kept to make it recognisable as Tarot. For me that is the structure and the energies behind the cards. Although i have played with non-traditional symbolism in all my decks, I have stuck to the 78 card structure and my own interpretations of recognisable meanings within that. Also I find the elemental association within the suits very important and always try to emphasis that more than the symbol which represents it…except perhaps in the Transparent, where in the minors I had to be SO minimalist to make it work. The stylised figures are in the corresponding colour of their element, (apart from swords which are purple, as yellow would have been practically invisible!), but the traditional suit symbols and much Rider-Waite based symbolism remains in their poses. I didn’t want to alienate people, I wanted them to have something that was still familiar and safe. With the Tarot I have painted, (Tarot of the Sidhe, Tarot of the Black Mountain and the current WIP the Neverland Tarot), I generally emphasis the nature of the element and the story of the card over the traditional symbols.

As to what my decks have brought to the table that wasn’t there before, well the Transparent has brought a way of reading that wasn’t physically possible before- only in the imagination. Now instead of the standard 78 images there are billions of possible combinations that you might get as images to interpret. It has given people a tool to encourage using their intuition, but in a playful way. Anyone who has sat with the deck in front of them knows how playful it is- you just have to fiddle with those cards! And that gets through boundaries, it gets people thinking outside the box.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Would you say that reading the tarot is a way of making the unconscious conscious? If so, who’s unconscious? Your unconscious or your listener’s?

EMILY CARDING: Well that’s a really interesting question and one which there can’t be a definitive answer to, even on a personal level. How the Tarot works is a mystery, a wonderful mystery into which we can delve as deep as we choose to and there’s always questions and more to explore.

When reading for another person, I think a strong energy connection is created- provided the sitter is actually open and not sitting there cross-armed and challenging. You could go into some sort of rational process of analysing the reading, looking at who is shuffling, who is selecting cards etcetera, but a good reading is the child of a meeting of energies between both reader and sitter.

I do have my pet ‘scientific’ explanation for how tarot works, which does not negate the spiritual or take the ‘divine’ out of the divination, but rather shows that there is more to it that woo-haha in the eyes of a sceptic. That is that we are all exposed to more information than our conscious mind processes on a day to day basis, and that, as you say in your question, the Tarot gives us the means to unlock that information, which on the deepest levels is looking at the patterns that lie beneath daily life. If you believe everything is connected, as modern science is starting to prove, then it follows that even seemingly random events that we witness may be giving our subconscious clues as to apparently unrelated events elsewhere- even the other side of the world. Butterfly wings causing tornadoes and all that jazz. So leaving the spiritual out of the equation, you get pretty much the same answer. Yes, the Tarot helps to translate the language of the subconscious- it’s like the babel fish of the deeper levels of the mind- and that includes your subconscious perceptions of the person you’re reading for.

Of course for those of us of a spiritual or magical persuasion, there’s a lot more going on, but the same basic principle applies. The tarot is a babel fish, whether it is translating the language of your mind or the messages from spirits or Gods.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: I would like to go back to the transparent tarot now. Any opaque tarot give us a limited set of elements we can permute by shifting their position in a two-dimensional plane. Any tarot image can be said to be ‘in dialogue’ with other images to the left, or the right, above or below them. The idea of transparency brings a third dimension into the picture, as now an image can also be in dialogue with images on top, or behind, itself. I have two questions about that: do you imagine that such transparent logic give is a better depiction of our own thought process? And then, have you considered the possibility of exploring other mediums different from painting to make this formal departure even more radical?

EMILY CARDING: Other media- like computer applications or film for example? A number of people have suggested a Transparent Tarot app for the iphone or ipad or similar…but I’m not that technically literate! I’d love to see someone else do something like that with it, but there are issues there with the publishers and so on. So really what I would like to see is other people who have strengths in other media taking the idea and running with it in new directions. I would be really interested to see that.

Also different people’s minds and perceptions work in different ways. I do think that the Transparent decks offer more fluidity and that does reflect the wondrous dimensions of the mind as well as the spirit realms. I’m also aware that not everyone can get their head around it!

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: I think that, at some point, you might want to look into the Marseille tarot, which is said to be ‘transparent’, as cathedrals are, so the details in an image can be over-imposed on the details of another image.

What I wonder is, what does transparence means? I remember, for example, how the notion of overlapping two elements was foreign to printing processes until relatively recently. As long as printing was achieved by pressing blocks on paper, over-imposing two elements was technically impossible. As a matter of fact, it was only when computer became widely accessible that one could stop thinking of design as ‘arranging blocks on a field’, and a third dimension, albeit illusory, was achieved. There were people like Neville Brody doing that before computers, but it was only thanks to computers that these visual resources became available for everybody. Every media brings its own ideas. Computers made possible for typography and image to fuse. Before that, pictures were treated as squares one had to compose with, treating the image as one would treat a letter. Is your transparent tarot a response to what has become our predominant visual landscape, or do you see transparency having specific advantages when it comes to create meaning in a reading?

EMILY CARDING: Yes, I should perhaps at some point look into creating a Marseilles… if I ever do another Transparent deck it will either be a Marseilles or a Lenormand.. or perhaps eventually both. But the process is so fiddly and exhausting, just working out how everything will fit together, that it’s not something I’m planning just yet. I have a lot of other projects lined up. I do love cathedrals though, and often dream of impossibly large ones…

As to the nature of transparency, well…when I first had the idea, that is it burst into my head, and I had no idea if it had been done or then if it COULD be done. I presumed that if it could be done, then someone else must have thought of it already, and I was thrilled and amazed when I realised that not only was this idea completely original, but that I could find a way to make it work. Some have called it a step in the evolution of Tarot…well, that would be nice, but unless someone picks up the baton and develops the idea, then the Transparent decks are more like a genetic freak, the X-Men mutants of the Tarot world! As the idea was not a result of a conscious process but rather a startling eureka moment which I then had to explore whether it was possible, I can’t claim it as a response to modern media or the 21st Century environment, merely a direct inspiration. So you’ll have to ask my muse. As you hinted at in an earlier question, the idea of layering reflects the nature of the human mind and psyche, and transparency has always been present in nature if not in Art, from when we first looked into a pool and saw both the surface and the depths at once. In fact I recommend everyone tries taking the Transparent Tarot in the bath with them!

The advantages I have found as far as using the Transparent for readings goes… it gives extraordinary details…tiny details which can open up such deep insights in completely unexpected ways, just by how the cards interact. Noticeable details, such as whether figures are facng towards or away from each other, or something as subtle as sword blades seeming to break on blades of grass. It’s very chaotic, in the best possible way, and often the combinations still astound me. A year or so ago my Grandmother passed away, and I found myself unable to attend her funeral due to a cancelled train. I happened to have my Transparent Tarot with me, so sat in a cafe eating breakfast, I pulled three cards to see if I could get some sort of message from her. The image that was formed astounded me, beause the three cards came together in such a way as to not only give a message of love and forgiveness, but formed a very clear image of Christ on the cross. My grandmother was a firm Catholic, and it seemed to me she was saying that she had returned to her God. A powerful moment. That is the kind of fluidity and flexibility offered by the Transparent decks.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: I have a final question: what makes life worth living?

EMILY CARDING: What makes life worth living? My goodness- Life itself! Every breath, every drop of rain, every ray of sunlight, every dog fart, every moment of awe. In fact every moment of everything. Life is a great adventure, life is a tragedy, a sit-com, a romance…the world is full of all kinds of magic and beauty and I love it all. I feel things very intensely and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Oh, and chocolate, of course!

New York – Cornwall, (South West UK), January 2011

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