INTRODUCTION
This is the story behind the work — not an account of triumph, but of persistence. For decades, my life has moved between necessity and craft: the years spent working simply to stay afloat whilst giving fully to art. Through both ran the same current — the irrepressible need to make, to keep shaping something by hand, however modest, as a way of staying in the world.
the first spark
At fourteen, I borrowed a book about the Rider–Waite deck from the local library and was struck by the clarity of Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations. Each card — its colour, composition, and detail — felt like a story unfolding before my eyes.
I wasn’t seeking fortune-telling; I was drawn to the narrative hidden within each symbol. I wanted to understand the language of image — seventy-eight variations of human experience distilled into form.
Two years later I bought my own deck. I remember the weight, the slip and slide of the cards, the smooth finish, the faint scent of ink. They felt human, alive. But it was not mysticism that caught me but craftsmanship. Someone had made this: measured, drawn, printed, and trimmed it into existence. That awareness of labour — of the unseen maker — stayed with me.
when the tower falls
There’s rarely warning before the structure of a life collapses. Mine came gradually, then all at once — a shift that left work, place, and certainty behind. What followed wasn’t romantic reinvention but survival — rebuilding from whatever materials remained.
In those years, art became the only constant. It wasn’t ambition that drove me, but necessity — a way to make meaning inside the rubble. My studio was wherever I slept: kitchens, rented rooms, borrowed corners. Making was no longer a luxury; it became the way to stay human.
Looking back, that collapse was less a tragedy than a correction. What fell away were illusions of permanence. What stayed was the work — a record of endurance that began with that fall and never really ended.
the leap
Starting education in my middle years was not a decision made from freedom but from need. I began at foundation level without even an A level in Art, balancing study, freelance jobs, and parenting. I worked by day and made by night.
That decade of study became its own act of persistence. I earned my BA(hons) and later a scholarship for a three year post graduate in Fine Art from the Royal Academy in London — not as credentials but as survival, as testament.
Each stage was a test of patience and clarity: how to build a language of form that could carry weight, how to shape a life that could hold art without breaking under it. It wasn’t the traditional path to art, but then, few worthwhile paths ever are.
What mattered most in that period was not ambition but endurance. Learning was not abstract or aspirational; it was practical, incremental, often exhausting. I was not building a career so much as assembling a way of working that could survive real life — time pressure, responsibility, fatigue. What emerged was not confidence, but clarity: an understanding of what I could sustain, and what I could not. That clarity has guided everything since..
what i kept doing
After the Royal Academy, I never stopped making. Exhibitions, drawings, commissions, teaching, workshops, gallery work, studio work — and long stretches when none of it was seen and none of it paid. Some works were public; many were private. But all were acts of continuation.
Over time, the rhythm of working became the life itself. The studio replaced everything that had fallen away — it was both shelter and task. Within that space, the act of making found its scale again. I drew, erased, built, and began again. Something I know many makers experience.
There is nothing glamorous in that process. It is repetition, error, patience, and the slow calibration of the hand and the mind. Yet it carries its own kind of freedom — a release from the need for approval or outcome.
a deck born in stillness
Then, COVID stunned the world into silence. In a top-floor flat on the South Coast of England, overlooking empty water, I was handed two strange gifts: time, and silence. Over the years I often found myself facing that old promise I had made decades before — to create a deck of my own. The right moment never seemed to arrive — until the world stopped moving.
With time suspended and the horizon stilled, the work began. The days were measured by line and colour rather than clocks. As always, isolation brought its own clarity: the quiet was no longer absence but space enough to think, to experiment, to build.
The Tribute Tarot grew from that stillness — a slow unfolding began. The cards, their stories, their symbols — all resurfaced with a quiet insistence.
the work begins
No deadlines. No audience. Just process.
I tested materials, redrew, re-layered, and corrected. The work became a conversation between persistence and restraint — between craft and the unknown. I found a visual language that belonged neither entirely to the past nor the present but to the thread between them.
Each card was built slowly, through repetition and correction, until the noise dropped away and form remained. In that silence, the images began to speak — not loudly, but with conviction.
What emerged was not a reinvention but a conversation — between me and the original deck, between solitude and expression. I searched for a Goldilocks balance between homage and invention. A visual language took shape, card by card to become The Tribute Tarot deck.
" To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others.
Yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
the truth of the artists life
After decades of working, I know now that art is not a refuge but a rhythm — a way to keep moving through uncertainty.
There is no retirement from it, no summit to reach. Only the work: imperfect, ongoing, shaped by necessity and sustained by will.
I’ve lived simply and worked constantly, travelling when I had to, staying when there was no choice, working, adapting as I went — from the UK to elsewhere, to the next quiet place. It has never been a matter of choice so much as of continuity: a life built from making, and remaking.
I am deeply aware of my fortune to have been able to start and to keep making and also to have lived long enough at all, when so many before me could not and did not.
Purpose, for me, is found in the act itself — in knowing that each brushstroke, each card, each word, is a small defiance against erasure.
the art of movement
For more than three decades, my art has moved with me. From the Himalayas to the backstreets of Delhi, from small islands to vast cities, I’ve painted, drawn, and assembled work wherever I found myself — on boats, rooftops, beaches and borrowed workshops.
Travel hasn’t simply inspired me; it has shaped how I see and how I work. The rhythm of movement became a way of looking — a discipline of observation that taught me to attend to what endures amid change. Each shift of place brought a change of light, of colour, of pace; and the work absorbed them all.
The Abracadabra series ( see image) — sixty-six drawings created across continents and moments of flux — became a kind of visual passport: proof that making can happen anywhere. What mattered was not location, but motion. Movement has always been the pulse of my practice: the work moves with me.
leaving as continuation
Now I look outward again. Travel calls, and I will answer — not only for adventure, but for continuity, a way to keep the work alive, the meaning of this tarot deck alive.
For more than two decades my life has moved in cycles of work and movement: periods of making, followed by periods of travel. In recent years that rhythm has been shaped less by choice than by circumstance — rising costs, tightening opportunities, and the wider political climate that now touches even the simple act of crossing borders.
In the UK, the slow erosion of honest creative space — rising rents, rising age, narrow margins, and dwindling opportunity — has made work there increasingly untenable. Leaving is not escape but another adaptation: a return to self-reliance, to working with the materials and means available.
Wherever I go, the thread remains the same. Whether in motion or in stillness, I’ll continue revisiting old works, shaping new ones. What comes next isn’t fixed; that uncertainty is part of its life. There’s no final arrival, only the next beginning. What matters is that the work continues — wherever I do.
One of the reasons I made this tarot was that it might survive when I no longer do — a record not of permanence, but of persistence. In that way, the Tribute Tarot completes its circle: made by hand, passing into other hands, carrying forward the quiet proof that what is irrepressible endures.
what comes next
What comes next may take many forms — hopefully, the Phoenix Edition of the Tribute Tarot, and then, another kind of image or story altogether. The shape isn’t fixed, and that’s the point. I’ve learned that art rarely ends where you expect; it turns, renews, and begins again.
For now, I’ll keep working, travelling, refining — following the same thread that began with the first sketch. The medium may shift, but the rhythm endures. Each new piece belongs to the same conversation: a study of endurance, of what persists through change.
You can read more about my work at www.sandlaurenson.com
the well beneath the deck
For more of what lies beneath the cards, explore the broader body of work that runs beside the Tribute Tarot — drawings, paintings, sculpture and mixed-media pieces created across the years. Each belongs to the same conversation: a record of observation, labour, and persistence.
