C e l e s t e H a n c h a r
2026
P O R C E L A I N T I L E
C O B A L T U N D E R G L A Z E

Each tile in this series is a singular act of translation — from the interior world of dream and symbol to the surface of fired clay. The tarot has always been a mirror; here, the artist holds it to herself.

The historical research underpinning this body of work reaches into two distinct but deeply connected traditions. Joseph Campbell and Richard Roberts’ Tarot Revelations grounds the series in the class structures of medieval Europe encoded within the deck’s four suits — the clergy, the peasantry, the Nobles, the merchant class — each carrying its own relationship to power and to the body. Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch runs alongside this as a darker counterpoint: her account of how the transition to capitalism was built on the violent suppression of women’s autonomy, folk knowledge, and bodily sovereignty illuminates what was at stake for the people those suits described.

The witch trials were not anomaly— they were instruments of social control, targeting precisely the women who held communal, healing, and symbolic knowledge outside institutional sanction. Together these sources ask what it has always cost to know things outside the permitted channels — to read symbols, to trust the body, to seek inner power through means the
dominant culture does not authorize.

Special Recognition goes to designer Aine O’Neill, whose custom built tile cutters ensured each piece retained the dimensions of a standard tarot card throughout the clay’s shrinking process.

Researchdrawn from: Campbell & Roberts, Tarot Revelations (1978); Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004)