A nocturnal reimagining of the classic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot in black and white, inspired by medieval art, Romanticism and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Earthsea”, it includes the complete minor and major arcana and 9 unique, additional cards in the form of 5 ‘Threshold’ Cards and 4 ‘Realm’ cards.
Celestio is a world where fantasy meets cartomancy, light meets dark and where classic tarot archetypes inhabit a new world full of stars.
Tarot Celestio marks the latest stage of a creative partnership lasting more than ten years. It has been a wild journey for us both as we immersed ourselves in an ever expanding world, plunged into a night full of stars and its many cloaked characters. We have spent the last years delving deeper into Celestio, world-building, illustrating, writing, designing and realising our vision, one of spirituality, philosophy and artistic expression.
Rachel had long wanted to illustrate her own tarot deck and late last year finally sat down and began work. As she embarked on the project, inspired by what came before, new ideas emerged, plans flickered and thoughts of building something beyond the traditional deck began to take shape. Thomas took up a pen and a novella was written, tales of Celestio to accompany the drawings, enriching the existing symbolism behind a beloved, ancient practice.
We've been writing music together for over a decade, creating albums to escape into, and so we found ourselves wanting to create another world to do the same, this time in a different media, out of our comfort zones and into another. Embarking on our own journey in the process.
Each individual card has been illustrated by hand in pen and ink and presented in the black and white style Rachel has been honing over the years. Drawing, much like singing, a way to calm her own anxieties. We took these raw drawings and with the help and expertise of our good friend and multi-disciplined artist and designer, Kiyoshi Stelzner, elevated these to the cards they are today.
No AI, minimal retouches, embracing the analogue, human spirit and all its imperfections, a vision of world created by friends.
We would exchange photos and musings of the cards, inspired by the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and what they meant to us, our burgeoning interest in Tarot having bloomed when the world shut down in 2020 and we sought ways to cope amongst the gloom.
Now living in different countries, logistics proved to be the hardest part of an already lengthy creative process. Rachel lives in the UK, Thomas in Germany, at Haus Nostromo HQ, so our 'Tarot Celestio' meetings would face the battle of ever increasing travel costs, cancelled flights, broken technology and navigating mundane but necessary work schedules.
We'd decided from the start we wanted to make a deck as locally as we could, be that in England or Germany, and as high quality as we could afford, within reason for a small two person business like ours.
In a serendipitous moment, Rachel stumbled across Taylor Brothers printers, a local printing company in Bristol with a 200 year old history and a 45 minute walk away from her home, alongside a river and through numerous industrial estates.
We worked on the production for months, overseeing manufacturing to make sure it was as beautiful as we could make it, whilst maintaining our commitment to use quality material that were locally sourced maintaining our ethics and eco policies and trying not to bankrupt ourselves along the way.
We have poured so much of what we love and hold dear into Celestio. In reality we are two melancholic souls, dreamers you could say, and the world we have built together is a new one full of possibility, a darkness illuminated for exploration, celebrating imagination, providing solace and encouraging reflection. We hope you join us on the journey.
