LISTENING FIELDS
A hand-painted card practice

Twenty fields for noticing, making and returning.

Cards have been part of my work for many years.

Listening Fields brings me back to the small space of a card, but from somewhere new.

This forthcoming handbook invites you to make twenty hand-painted cards of your own, using colour, marks, texture, space and fragments of language.

A different kind of card practice

Listening Fields does not begin with fixed meanings or an image to reproduce.

Each card offers a title, a little context and a Listening Fragment. From there, you respond through paint, colour, marks and whatever begins to appear.

You can later return to the cards in different ways. Chosen deliberately, drawn without looking, written about, or simply noticed again.

What matters is not finding the right interpretation, but noticing where your attention goes.

Twenty fields

Each card begins with a title.

What Remains Underneath.
Sudden Wind.
Dry Ground.
Beside One Another.
A Break in the Cloud.
On What Is Not Said.

Rather than illustrating the title, you respond to it through paint.

No finished deck to copy, and no single visual language to follow. The handbook offers a little context, a Listening Fragment and room for your own response.

Making the cards

The handbook moves from idea into making.

You will work with colour, mark-making, texture, space and the small decisions that change a card as it develops.

Guidance is provided, but there is no image to reproduce exactly.

The aim is not to make twenty matching cards.

It is to make twenty cards that feel as though they belong together, while still belonging to you.

A return to cards

If you first found my work through The Textured Tarot, Tarot Gallimaufry or one of my other card projects, this may feel like a return.

It does to me too.

But I am not trying to return to where I was.

The years between have brought painting, writing, cloth, stitching and Listening Fields. All of that now comes back with me into the small space of a card.

The form is familiar. What happens inside it has changed.

Coming soon

Listening Fields: A hand-painted card practice is coming next.

I'll be sharing glimpses of the making as the cards begin to gather.

If you'd like to know when the handbook is ready, you can join my occasional newsletter below.