Development

the Ogham alphabet with associated trees

Inspired by my own Gaelic heritage and interests in folklore and botany, the goal of this project was to create a complete tarot deck based on botanical symbolism. I was keen to do this but, unfortunately due to time stress as other projects grew, I didn't manage to take this one further. I've still included the initial working I did below for whatever interest it is worth, along with very brief descriptions for context.

conceptual project brief

'Timemongers' tarot deck - Maria Surducan

bookshelf inspiration

As shown in the above picture, inspirations for this project were taken from bookshelf favourites like 'Godfather Death' by Nicholls & Sarda, 'Celtic Tales' by Forrester, and the ornithological works of KS White. A conversation I had at LICAF with the lovely Maria Surducan, illustrator of the 'Timemongers' tarot deck pictured, heavily inspired the tarot approach.

RESEARCH

This required a lot of initial research into interlinking subjects; to combine them correctly, I had to understand them individually. I did a lot of reading on Tarot cards and their values and some further research into botanical folklore.

B O T A N I C A L F O L K L O R E V I S U A L I N S P O . . .

T A R O T V I S U A L I N S P O . . .

Below are some of my notes in the process of putting this research together.

LINKING BOTANICAL SYMBOLISM & TAROT VALUES

[process of researching folk tales/legends/etc, and matching botanicals to Tarot values]

I used the research process above to choose and match botanicals to corresponding Tarot values. You can see my choices and reasoning in the notes, and some thumbnails for those I got round to visualising below.