Hey Frank!

Thank you for agreeing to do this. I'm sitting in our local maker space today, listening to the sloshy wet movement of cars and people outside; the sky an uninviting palette of greys. Wonder if it's the same down there in Carmarthenshire, and how you're doing in this last thrust of winter?

Heh, well it's funny you asked me to talk about the Wheel because I'm suddenly thrust into some Big Life Changes - my partner and I have split (very amicably) and I'll be moving out of our house in the next few months. I'm enjoying the slowness at the end of winter This time of year I'd normally be buying seeds for the veg patch and working out what I want to sow where, but this year I don't need to adhere to that particular time structure and I'm enjoying letting it go for now.

Could you introduce yourself (however you'd like!) to the LRT community?

Hello shwmae I'm Frank, a white nonbinary autistic painter, printmaker, illustrator & graphic designer who's from Cardiff originally but now living near Carmarthen in West Wales. My personal practice asks questions about what we are conditioned to believe is normal, and reveals the magic of dwelling in liminal spaces. I've been working with the tarot for over 30 years and this deck started to appear to me in I think 2021.

I've been enjoying hanging out with this deck over this past week. It was a delight to unpack - it's got such a luxurious feel, the box is gorgeous, I like the slightly bigger-than-standard size, the colour palette is so vividly inviting. It feels like playful shadow work: like the horned character in the moon card, or death dancing in the graveyard. How would *you* describe the character of this deck, and is there a card that best represents it for you?

Oh this deck definitely has a life and mind of its own! It's very direct, no-bullshit, and can be brutal in its readings. I often gasp and laugh when I pull cards that read me ragged! Its finding its own way in the world - it decided it wanted to be created, it's decided it wants to be in a book that's coming out at the end of the year, it brings people to it. It's the weirdest experience!

In your Kickstarter blurb, you describe your resistance to creating this deck, and that it came anyway. Could you tell us a little about this resistance, and the process that emerged?

My resistance was around the fact that there are seventy-eight fucking cards! I was cutting lino and in this process images just sort of appear in my head so I cut them - and I realised I'd cut a card that looked like the Ace of Cups. Ha ha, nope, I thought. Then I think a couple of weeks later another lino plate made me think, oh dear, this is the Magician. I don't want to cut a tarot deck, it's so much work, who will buy it, it will take forever etc etc. & then the deity I work with told me flat out I had to do it, and said "everything will come from this" (they were not lying!). So I cut a few more cards and then decided I would do a sort of slow Kickstarter where people could pre-order the deck on my website and that would encourage me to keep going and also help pay for printing. I got print costs, had an astrologer friend devise a good election to launch the pre-order, and it was a roaring success. The images appeared to me at random - if I had to think them up they'd be shit - I had to wait for *gestures at everything* to upload them into my brain, and then I'd cut them. The colours they needed to be would appear as I cut them and I printed them in batches as I went along. I was done in September 2024, sent the first edition to press, and then wrote the guide book in a couple of weeks. Looking back, it seems impossible. But it wasn't that stressful - it felt incredibly easy. The most stressful thing was getting the printer to deliver in time for people to get their decks in time for Christmas! but the creation process itself - it flowed of its own accord. 

You describe the deck as drawing on sacred geometry and layered symbolisms. I'm also really curious about the colours used: they feel deeply codified and rich with meaning to me, particularly when I arrive at a pink card in a stack of blue in a suit, for example. Could we hear more about the deck's foundations and the symbols and codes embedded in it? (And the crows! Tell us about the crows!)

Crows first - Crow came to me at the beginning of the pandemic. I was creating a daily sketchbook that I would share on instagram (I'm not on there anymore) called The Plague Diary. And Crow showed up as this chaotic neutral being who is the sort of antithesis of rainbow capitalism love-is-love crap. Crow is very much a trickster and a creature of saying it as it is. They are here to destroy what is no longer serving us. The geometric structure is one I've used for a very long time - based around rule of thirds and then adding central lines, diagonals etc. I draw it on every lino I cut and i work from there. The colours as I said are very intuitive - I can't really say more than that. Very little about this deck is a conscious choice! The symbols change meaning as they need to but I'd say something like skulls are hidden treasure, squiggles are magic, hands indicate the potential or need for human shaping of the situation. But those are my feelings and whatever comes to whoever's reading it - that meaning is correct. The tarot speaks to us in our own languages.

How did art and tarot make their way into your life in the first place?

My mum was an untrained painter and brilliant at it - she gave it up when she had kids. And I got it from her, I guess. And I was always drawing. And in my early teens I was very curious about witchcraft and bought my first ever tarot deck, The Mythic Tarot, from Rebel Rebel in Cardiff when I was about 15. I learned the meanings but I wasn't a great reader at all - it took me a long time to understand how to open up to it. And - this is something I've only just realised right now, so thank you for this questions - I'd say my understanding of how to use my drawing skills to represent my experience in the world of being a queer witch - came at the same time as learning to tap into the current of the tarot. Witchcraft and art and tarot and queerness are all the same thing to me.

I love to get an insight into how other creatives work: your workspace(s), what materials you use, what music, animals, moods accompany you. Could you share anything of your creative practice?

When I made the tarot I was partly living and working in a static caravan, and partway through the process I moved in with my partner. So at present my studio is amazing - about 5m square (it's the biggest bedroom), lined with wood, with big windows onto the garden. My partner has a nice house! I have a lot of desk space and an etching press and a little sofa to sit on and think. My walls are covered in pictures I've acquired - torn from magazines and what have you. A green-eyed tabby cat called Gretchen co-habits with me and she's with me a lot of the day. When I'm doing client work I have silence but when I'm linocutting or painting I listen to drone and ambient noise and burn incense sticks. I am generally living as good a dream as my child self could possibly have wanted. I am incredibly lucky. And who knows what my next space will look like? It will likely be the lounge of wherever I move to - I need a lot of space for printing. As long as I can have a little corner to sit with friends with a beer or some tea I'll be grand.

Is there a card that is particularly meaningful to you at the moment?

Oh that's a very good question. So many come to mind! I'm going to pull one now - ha! the six of pentacles. Rachel Pollack (rest in power) has a wonderful description in her "Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom" about opening ourselves up to receiving help. I am shit at asking for and receiving help so this is a big lesson I am leaning into at the moment. Opening myself up to the idea that things flow to me and away from me - we receive and we give and that's a big part of being in community. I said to some friends this week about how I'm going to be saving every penny to buy my own place so I won't be able to go to this one-day music festival they'd invited me to, and one of them just bought me a ticket, & I burst into tears. It's very difficult for me and I'm working to get over being unhealthily self-reliant, which is such a huge aspect of capitalism's cult of individualism.

And is there anything else you'd like to share about your tarot practice, this deck, or anything else, that you haven't had a chance to mention yet?

I think my biggest advice is learning to trust your own instinct and intuition around meaning, how you work with the cards. This deck doesn't feel like "my" deck but a deck that came through me and is its own thing, and so whatever meanings you get from it are correct for you. As an aside, this is the reason I don't see any point in trying to read someone else's spread, as in if I tell you I pulled the Hermit and the Magician there's no point you telling me what you think that means because the cards are speaking to me in my language. It's subjective. Anyway I was talking to a friend who has kids and I was talking about the feeling that this deck isn't mine and has its own will, and she laughed and said it is like my child, as in, I have made it but it is its own person. And I like that a lot.

Thank you so much for your time, Frank, and thank you for this stunning offering to the world. Looking forward to meeting irl with a hot drink next time you're up in mid-Wales! Elena x

Diolch o galon, Elena - thank you from the heart! x

Check out Queer Crow Death Magic here and more from Frank here.