Candida Powell-Williams British , b. 1984
The project followed a research residency at the Warburg Institute London exploring tarot's cultural heritage and the mutation of symbols. Tarot originated as a 15th century card game with the illustrations designed as a procession of Christian enlightenment. As time passed their meaning was altered by readers who reworked the illustrations to add more potency to their varying spiritual agendas. They still have a hold over those of us who endlessly hope and search for more control and more understanding of how we should be in the world. I re-imagine the iconic tarot as a three-dimensional experiment in symbolism, action, story-telling and magical thinking.
The twenty-two major arcana Tarot cards, once created through a live performance and then animation act as both a memory and a catalyst. The symbols within are re articulated into sculptural form enlarged to human scale shifting their meaning and appear like disneyfied relics or ruins fabricated in sweet gradients of yellow, pinks and greens.
These sculptural symbols share my interest in the development of ciphers in the West which coincided with popularisation of the printing press: so that sharing information, paradoxically, became more open and more secret at the same time. These objects therefore explore the collision between power and mysticism and between sharing knowledge and secrecy.