‘The Tarot Under The Hill’

Nooka Shepherd

16th of January - 21st of January - The London Art Fair 2024

‘The Tarot Under The Hill’ is an ongoing project between artist Nooka Shepherd and Soho Revue. This initial body of work encompasses the Major Arcana, but both the artist and gallery endeavour to gradually expand the series into a full tarot deck. Developed and printed at the gallery’s in-house print studio, with guidance by technician James Randell, the series is made up of hard ground etchings, a technique which lends itself to Shepherd’s confident line work.

Shepherd’s relationship with tarot is both established and ever-evolving; daughter of a witch and diviner, the visual language of the tarot has been an omnipresent force in her imagination and subconscious. “Watching my mother read, sneaking into her room and opening the box that smelled of incense and amber where her cards were kept; I would pour over them, fingers moving over the different decks, wondering at the ways in which the cards would be the same, how they would be different, how meaning shifted through the power of images.” Tarot is a visual language drawing upon many traditions- numerology, astrology, Quabalah, archetypes, myth and metaphor.  As much as each card is fixed in its established meaning, it is also subject to change and flux, transforming through interpretations according to the reader and their intuitive response to the image. The tarot therefore is an oxymoron, it juxtaposes itself, it is a paradox. It is both a discipline and a practice. There are rules, but they are there to be fluid.

The title ‘The Tarot Under The Hill’ hints at faery stories of Hollow Hills and the mythologies surrounding such sacred burial mounds. Within Shepherd’s wider artistic practice, there is a strong interest in ecology, otherworldliness and the Underworld. “The province of birds and beasts, plants and spirits, memory and the dead. The cauldron of time, where all is swirled spirals, endlessly cyclical and endlessly nourishing.” These notions coalesce as the beating heart of the ‘The Tarot Under The Hill,’ that dark but fertile place where the seed rests so it might burst forth and rise out of that darkness into life.