Works on Paper, 2022

Tegeder and Ray, both independent artists, first collaborated on a massive series of 78 original drawings, 5 paintings, and an original tarot deck entitled Abstract Futures Tarot. The exhibition debuted in a solo booth by the gallery at The Armory Show in New York to stunning success. That project served as a genesis for the duo to imagine new ways of expanding upon the tarot’s hidden meanings and to deepen their exploration of the relationship between ritual, magic, and art through the lens of abstraction. This new suite of drawings was created from the Abstract Futures Tarot deck through a series of 8 readings by Sarah Potter. Potter pulled 4-6 tarot cards for each work and created messages for each work, which are now the titles of the drawings. Tegeder and Ray used the card pulls for compositional inspiration, while drawing upon their considerable knowledge of color and pigment to imbue the drawings with color and crystal magic. Likening the drawings to ‘hidden gems,’ the duo harnessed the innate vibrational energy of specific colors and crystals to imagine the drawings as talismans, each with their own special power.

Through a multitude of ritual processes that accompanied the making of the works, the artists mined the immersive potential of divination as integral to their creative process. These include but are not limited to burning herbs, sigil-making, crystal, candle, and spirit invocations. In this way, the duo that constitute Hilma’s Ghost build upon the palimpsest ancestral legacies of the powerful women artists who bravely drew upon the occult, including Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Leonara Carrington, but also those women artists, like Ana Mendieta and Lygia Clark, who foregrounded the shamanic healing power of art for themselves.