Upon waters, it is written

In July 2019 I undertook a research fellowship at the Venice Biennale thanks to The British Council and Wysing Arts Centre. During the month, I navigated the city, and my interaction with it, through the lens of the Tarot deck. I used this regular activity as a moment of contemplation to consider the relationship between the image displayed and my lived experience of place. I would draw a card and use this as a prompt to create a written response, somewhere between poetry and stream of consciousness. As the project developed, I begun making use of Suminagashi prints that I was creating as a background for my writing, the small rectangular format echoing the Tarot card itself. Suminagashi is a form of paper marbling in which fluid, organic patterns are created by floating ink on water. The process resonated with me with the connections to Scrying and water divination, seeming an apt visual parallel to Tarot and my use of stream of consciousness as a form of contemplation. On each reading I documented the card drawn, my written response, the location itself and the geographic coordinates in Google Maps. I would drop a pin, over time creating a network of points across the city to create a constellation of written and lived moments within the labyrinth of Venice.