Artwork Description
Swoon – Oracle Deck: Quilt-Ancestors
Dimensions: 17 x 11″
Year: 2024
Medium: archival digital print on Moab Entrada 300 gsm
Edition: ed. 1/20
This card invites you to examine the ancestral quilt into which you are
stitched.
There are stories handed down in every family: How your forebears overcame unbeatable odds, or didn’t. Secrets they ran from. Dreams they couldn’t achieve but still hold a torch for, in hopes of what you might accomplish in their place. There are illnesses and buried forms of genius. Wellsprings of compassionate sensitivity that could not be fostered under the harsh circumstances of previous generations, but which remained alive through the ages, only now to be expressed in you. All of these form the fabric of who you are.
For Caelum, Grandma Eva’s quilt felt like a threat. It enveloped her in the knowledge that she was from of a family of deeply disturbed women. Was this her inevitable inheritance? Forced to reckon with the impacts of the trauma her family had faced, Caelum became able to process her own pain, and theirs, in a new way, and through it, she found a kind of freedom.
Are there ways that exploring your family narrative might empower you? Ways it has been disempowering you that you’re ready to let go of? Are there old accounts that still need settling? Reparations that are asking to be made? Old wisdom in danger of being lost?
This card asks how you can understand their lives in ways that make you more open to their knowledge, their wisdom, and maybe even their continued guidance.
–Swoon