ARCANE DAYS
Monday’s Child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s Child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s Child is full of woe,
Thursday’s Child has far to go,
Friday’s Child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s Child works hard for a living,
And the Child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.
Arcane Days is a project inspired by traditions of English fortune telling, using the nineteenth-century nursery rhyme, Monday’s Child, as a poetic basis, then drawing on the Pamela Colman Smith illustrations for the Major Arcana of the Rider-Waite tarot deck (1910) to enable the physicalisation of each performance.
The project envisions new archetypes, the outcomes of the abovementioned fortunes: a floral sphere obscuring the head of a figure in stark white replaces the Magician as the fair-faced child of Monday; the Hermit is reimagined as a mass of woeful, Wednesday’s child black, hidden behind several masks; the sensual reds of Friday’s child, so free with their love, are complemented by the fetishistic restraints of the Hanged Man.
