ceramic tarot

Ceramic Tarot
What happens when you blur art and science?

It’s in the (ceramic) cards

Even though artists run in the family, Emily never believed she got that gene. Then she found ceramics in her late 30s, in grad school, almost by accident.

In her first spring at Columbia's Spirituality Mind Body Institute, a friend was so enthusiastic about her Intro to Ceramics class, that every week in Archetypal Symbolism, she'd share about her joy playing with clay.

Emily had spent her whole life around performance, but she'd never made objects. Things with weight. Things that stay. Naturally, she had to infuse her own interests.

The first thing she began to experiment with was a set of four Aces: hand-cut porcelain tarot cards with stamped card names and carved suit symbols. After a few rounds of test cards, she landed on a style and started practicing the process.

One set of The Aces (2023) showed in a gallery on campus, and something clicked. She'd already created a tarot deck that was about to be published on paper (The Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot, Hachette Book Group, 2024), but now she wanted to know what happens when the esoteric becomes art and permanent sculpture.

Slowly, the practice has expanded. Those first aces led to several full Major Arcanas, and now finally full, 78-card tarot decks in porcelain. Each card gets rolled, cut, stamped with its name, carved with its Roman numeral or suit, fired, glazed, and finished with gold luster. It's slow. It's repetitive. It's easy to slip into flow. It's an excellent meditation for a neurodivergent brain like Emily’s; she's discovered how to systematize everything, the system itself becoming a ritual.

The best part: these cards aren't just for display. We can read with them.

A porcelain tarot card holds literal weight, you can't shuffle it or flip it carelessly. Every placement is deliberate. A reading with ceramic cards is slower, more intentional, more felt than anything paper can do. That collapse between art object and spiritual tool is the whole point.

Emily’s work has shown twice at the Macy Art Gallery and in the Gottesman Library at Columbia University Teachers College, and she's currently building toward multiple complete decks, new forms and expressions, and installations that pair the framed deck with live readings, left on the table like evidence.