Into the Forest: Swoon's Sibylant Sisters Oracle Deck
Last weekend I had the privilege and pleasure of attending the Santa Fe opening of the Sybilant Sisters Oracle deck by Caledonia Curry, the artist known as Swoon, at Turner Carroll gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our quest began the morning after we flew into Albuquerque from SFO, "Hang on St. Christopher" by Tom Waits comes on the rental car speakers as we're trying to find the road to Santa Fe from our hotel. Good omen, I think, as we turn the wrong way, and then the wrong way again. St. Christopher felt significant because he is the patron saint of travelers. So much for good omens, I guess.
When we finally find the right direction, my husband John notices something strange at the crossroads: a vintage black Jaguar that has missed its turn signal three times in a row. They aren't moving. It's impossible to read the situation. Mechanical? Medical? Psychiatric? Everyone is just driving by like nothing is happening. Technically, I guess, nothing is. But why? Although we've finally found the right direction, we decide to turn around once more. John calls 911, but we get disconnected. Someone from the Albuquerque Department of Public Safety calls back right away. "This number called 911? Do you need help?" When we explain the situation, they promise to send someone to check on him. Then we're back on the road, headed north, finally.
Did St. Christopher use us? Maybe? Sometimes, when you're willing to get turned around, the good omen is you. We'll never know if we were agents of the angels, because we had to keep driving. I hope the Jaguar driver is ok.
I'm wearing my new white cowboy boots, and I'm excited to have protection from snakes in case we decide to explore someplace wild, like some of the many intriguing abandoned places we've seen along the old Route 66, just off the highway. Drive-in movies, abandoned motels and sun-bleached gas stations with broken neon, overgrown with ivy and grass. Missing, hidden worlds from the past. John says he wishes he'd brought snake boots. I told him– “any boots can be snake boots if you're brave enough”.
I love the Southwest. The culture, the art, the food, the big skies, … all of it. We were already planning this trip before I noticed that Swoon had an opening coming up, but once I saw that the Sibylant Sisters Oracle was about to be released there, it felt like fate. I based our timing around making sure we got to that show. I've followed Swoon's work for years, so when she announced she was doing an oracle deck, I knew I wanted it. Oracle decks have always fascinated me. I co-created and illustrated one a few years ago, and I collect decks made by various artists. In my opinion, we are in a golden era of oracle deck design, and the idea of having one from Swoon's world felt electric.
The night before the gallery show, we attended Swoon's talk at the Santa Fe Art Institute. The program director welcomed us by saying that synchronicity had brought us all together, which hit me deep, especially after the Jaguar incident. There were about sixty of us packed into a small white room. Large drawings of characters from the Sibylant Sisters universe hung on the walls, and Swoon read from her novella aloud over projected clips from her feature film, which is still in production. The reading felt like a bedtime story. It's been ages since someone read me a bedtime story. I felt both lucky to be there, and small, and vulnerable. The film is stop motion and live action braided together, moving between dream worlds that elaborate on and blend into each other. I felt submerged in it before I realized what was happening. As a Sundance fellow, Swoon was awarded an entire film crew to help her realize this story world she's been building over multiple years and across mediums. She is still immersed in the filmmaking process.
After the screening Swoon described her process in detail. In the beginning she believed the Oracle deck would take six months, but instead it took three years. She showed a time lapse of the stop motion parts that revealed the depth and organic nature of that work. It becomes clear that finding and expressing truth is central to everything she makes. She said her friend calls fully formed intuitive ideas that demand to be expressed "haunted nuggets." As an artist, I found this metaphor so relatable that I'll be using it going forward. When I started my own oracle deck about the city of San Francisco (currently out of print) in 2019, I also spent longer than expected articulating the world with my collaborator. Sometimes having big thoughts hurts a little. For relief and satisfaction, you have to enter and walk through the haunted nugget to unfold it and express it. I felt insane when it happened to me. I'm grateful for this term that reminds me that I wasn't ever crazy.
With the Sibylant Sisters oracle deck, Swoon has articulated a world that it took her twelve years of therapy to see in an empowering way. At first she couldn't speak about her traumas without shaking, and now she has created a beautiful story world capable of helping others heal from similar traumas. Storytelling became the mechanism for surviving. Sharing your heart as art can be an alchemical process.
Swoon explains Medea, a sculpture about a mother from Greek mythology who destroys what she loves
After the film, Swoon did a short synopsis of her career. She talked about the Medea sculpture, which is beloved by many people, and contains so much truth, … though it's still complicated for her personally. She shared during the talk that her mother was addicted to opiates and had a psychotic break when Swoon was young that was very traumatizing. The piece came from a haunted nugget that wouldn't leave her alone. A relationship with archetypes and their power to heal developed from there.
The Sibylant Sisters world and oracle deck grew out of this investigation of archetypal storytelling; the archetypes come from the story world of children, little girls, and specifically her younger self. The 88-card deck is set deliberately in the past, Florida in the 1980s, with illustrations of specific artifacts of a remembered childhood in the wilds of the gray house containing a complicated family, and the neighborhood friends and safer adults that nurtured her young spirit. She leans into the tropes of childhood intentionally, and plays with pop culture in a way that's genuinely rare in the fine art world. The resulting story looks your inner child directly in the eye and does not blink. If you were a feral kid in the 80s, the Sibylant Sisters will find you down a dirt road, standing on an anthill on a dare, getting fed and washed by a kindly neighbor, collecting glitter stickers, looking for unicorns, and finding innate inner resources just in time.
Pegasus is one of the 88 cards in the Sibylant Sisters Oracle deck
The Turner Carroll Gallery is small and full of natural light. The show is open through the end of July tenth, and feels like a dream expanded out from a single point into refractions across the whole room. On the left wall, all 88 card illustrations hang together in a grid. On the back wall, a large drawing on paper: two young girls in a twin bed, a fairyland world blooming above them in a cloud. This drawing feels like the seed that the rest of the show grows from. On the right wall, original drawings from the deck hang quite large, which reframes them entirely, making the intimate monumental.
Near the window, each card appears again in a smaller grid with a QR code beside it linked to an explanation of each card's meaning. The first room feels like walking inside the deck. The sense of time and place and childhood is palpable. Nostalgic, dreaming, not quite past. Manifest memory. A side room shows more process, as well as art from other phases of her career.
Swoon was present and accessible at the show. She pulled and interpreted cards for a few people. She pulled Ten the Dog for me. Lost, but found. A gentle confrontation of my true self. Her reading: everyone has a stray dog heart that longs to return home. Number Ten is a lucky dog.
I've looked up to Swoon for a long time. She's a major player in an art tradition I first connected with in the 2000s when I met a group of artists who had worked with her on several junk boat projects that culminated in crashing the Venice Biennale and sailing the Adriatic Sea. We had a nice conversation in the gallery about the scramble of making a show like this, about friends we have in common, and how proud I am of her for making this incredible work of art. Have you ever hand drawn 88 of something? Just that alone is an accomplishment, and that's not the half of it. I told her a little about the San Francisco Oracle, the deck I made with a friend we share in common, which is a love letter to San Francisco in 2019, an act of elegy, and a world built around a time and a place. I told her I was excited to use her deck and mine in combination. I combine oracle decks during my moments of introspection all the time. She seemed surprised one could use more than one deck concurrently. Later, when I played with her deck alone, I understood why. There is so much to see in the universe of her deck that it could seem unimaginable to use alongside other symbols. Back home in Oakland, I did use our decks concurrently, and the reading I got was actually beautiful, deeper than any reading I've pulled for myself in some time. I'll describe this reading in more detail in my next Rare Bird dispatch.
About mothers: As we were taking off from LAX to go to this show, I noticed an email from my mother. She'd made the local paper for serving Mother's Day tea at a Victorian mansion in the town where she lives. She cc'd two people on the email: my 20-year-old niece, who is one of her two grandchildren, and an artist who had painted her portrait the year before. I hit reply all: congratulations! How delightful. I didn't tell her I was on my way to Santa Fe. Enforcing my boundaries without expressing them is a skill she taught me for which I'm grateful.
My relationship with my mother has always been fraught. We aren't close. When I was seven, the age of the main character of the Sibylant Sisters, I was terrified of my mother. I spent as much time as possible at the neighbor's house or with friends who had nice parents, and I would cry when I had to go home. One time she cut off all my hair as a punishment for trying to give myself bangs. I remember her screaming at me as she held me up to the mirror and told me I looked like a boy.
(Haircut, author, 1983.)
In this photo, I had just recently endured a hysterical adult, with scissors, snipping at my head and yelling at me in the mirror. I have confronted her about this, but she doubles down with a justification about how hard I was to raise and she didn't know how else to deal with me. I felt isolated and helpless. Through therapy and hard work, I became the adult I needed as a child, and I found safety. This is not a story about my relationship with my mother. And yet.
Swoon is open about her mother's very serious flaws, and the breaking point that shook her world for years to come. Mine had her own kind way of ensuring that I never felt safe in her home. Children who aren't happy and safe at home find various ways to cope. I colored in the corner. Swoon colored in the corner. Maybe you did too. The personal truth she has poured into a fictional world somehow makes more room for your own. The archetypes in the Sibylant Sisters world are specific enough to be true, and archetypal enough to be deeply personal. It works because it deals in tropes and recognizable archetypes, a specific world made mythic through visual storytelling. Swoon built this oracle deck from a childhood that was painful while she was living it. She has preserved something healing through her image-making: a world you can hold in your hands when the original is gone and was never quite safe.
The day after the show, alone with the deck, I pulled six cards. I wasn't expecting to go deep right away. The world is too intimate and specific to hold at arm's length. It doesn't allow it.
The six cards were: Katie/Innocence, Staff/Archetypal Assistance, Sweaty Boot/Exhaustion. The top row reads like a small child going on a tough journey. The bottom row reads like a shadow journey: Mumblebust Society/ a card about rules being enforced without compassion, Tears/Grief, and Katarina/Delusion. The bottom row reads like sadness for not meeting society's expectations, and an oblivious mother figure, lost in her own sauce, who cannot help. Overall, in this first reading alone, I saw a story about how, even with divine help, the road is long. Tears, grief, delusion, adults who see you as a problem to be fixed, or not at all, the journey you take anyway, and the divine assistance that arises even when you’re exhausted. This reading made me feel seen in ways I wasn't prepared to cope with. When you use this deck, please make sure you have a comfortable place to hold yourself with gentleness and care, because it may touch you in places you may not have prepared to face. For that alone, I give it five stars.
I thought back to St. Christopher on Route 66. I thought about the vintage Jaguar in the turning lane and the 911 call that got disconnected and the Department of Public Safety calling back. I thought about archetypal assistance. Serendipitous help that doesn't announce itself, that works through wrong turns and chance and a song coming on at the right moment. The deck looked back at me: yes, bravery is worthwhile, but it also has a cost. Quiet your heart and listen.
Into the Forest is open at Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe through July 10th. The Sibylant Sisters Oracle deck is now available for sale on Swoon’s website, here.