FUTURE/S OF CRAFT AND THE ATOM TAROT
2024 - Ongoing
Background
A key tenet of Atom Futures is that art is a crucial and transformative medium through which to shift perspectives and create more equitable and sustainable futures.
It is true of craft as well. Inspired by our year-long residency with Craft Central, a studio and gallery space home to craftspeople of both traditional and modern craft, we began an exploration into the Future/s of Craft. Using semiotics and futures thinking tools, we wanted to understand how emerging concepts of gender, power, technology, culture and nature are expressed through craft mediums, and whether these expressions could be captured in the form of a new universal symbology.
Craft as Expression
Craft is not just a technique or process, but a way of living, thinking and representing cultures, identities and belief systems. The contributions of craftspeople have historically shaped our human experience through political, economic and social expressions of craft.
One such craftsperson who inspired us on this explorative journey is Pamela Colman Smith, the artist behind the famous Ryder-Waite-Smith Tarot deck. Commissioned in 1909 in London to co-create and illustrate the cards, she revolutionised this divinatory form through her vivid depictions of the human condition through detailed archetypes and symbology.
Like many female artists, she did not receive due recognition for her work at the time. But in her cards lie her legacy, one where expressions of gender, power and spiritual belief gave a different perspective in an era when women, and particularly women from minority backgrounds, had little agency.
Reimagining The Tarot
As a tool for predicting futures, the Tarot has for centuries captivated people with its cards that are rich with symbology and cultural motifs. Many Tarot decks exist today, offering illustrated depictions and symbols of kinship, gender, sex and societal structures mirroring the condition of our human societies.
As a form of craft, the Tarot offers an opportunity to investigate how the symbology around these concepts may have evolved over time. The Tarot deck illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, for example, contains imagery and symbols that are still recognisable, and which resonate a century on. Her fluid portrayals of gender and sexuality were groundbreaking in 1909, as were her representations of power structures and our connections to the spiritual. Her illustrations are largely Western in style, however, given the context in which they were created in London.
As humanity has evolved and changed over the last century, including our understanding of gender, culture, nature, technology and power, an opportunity to reimagine a new universal symbology for the Tarot presents itself.
The ATOM Tarot Deck
After our year-long exploration of the Future/s of Craft, we are pleased to announce the creation of the ATOM Tarot Deck. It contains our reimagination of the 22 Major Arcana Cards of the Ryder-Waite-Smith Tarot deck.
Below is a selection of our cards.
