TIERA MAY 

Tiera May is a visual artist, musician, and graphic designer. She lives and works in a remote location in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

 

May’s work has previously been featured at the Nevada City Film Festival, the Wild & Scenic Film Festival,  Blue Line Art Gallery, The Museum of Northern California Art, B-So Gallery and 1078 Gallery.

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Artist's statement 

My work explores mythology, folklore and occult mysticism through analog collage. In what is quickly becoming a “paperless”age, the manipulation of paper as a medium and the challenge of seeking out physical source material in the form of rare books has become an obsession of mine.  Because of my reverence for and fascination with relics of the past, the dismantling of these books to incorporate them into my collage work is not unlike a ritual sacrifice for me; the act of cutting up an antique book pains the bibliophile in me yet I am still compelled to do it. This continuous dance of destruction and creation is integral to my process.

 

In 2019, I began developing the Ritual Tarot - a 78 card tarot deck. Every card in the tarot carries a deep and rich allegorical symbolism. The imagery for this project was created exclusively using deconstructed books and paper ephemera.  As I dissected and reassembled the traditional archetypes of the tarot, a new visual narrative emerged; a narrative that speaks to the archaic but also holds space in the present.