Organic Tarot Update :Two of Wands

Jul 30

Two of Wands

Organic Tarot | 9” × 12” Collage

The Two of Wands has followed me around for weeks.

Before beginning this collage, I found an old index card tucked into my studio—one I had written years ago while studying the tarot. Somehow, without planning it, I had already been preparing for this card. It felt less like coincidence than confirmation that some ideas wait patiently until we’re finally ready to understand them.

Traditionally, the Two of Wands represents vision, planning, and choosing a direction. It is the moment after inspiration arrives but before the journey begins.

That space feels incredibly familiar.

This year has become one of reinvention. I have stepped away from work that defined much of my identity and found myself asking a question that many artists eventually face: If I could build my life from the ground up, what would I make?

The collage answers that question symbolically rather than literally.

A radiant flower blooms around a serene face, becoming both sun and compass. Beside it rises a monumental red crystalline form—part architecture, part mountain, part wound. It feels ancient and newly discovered at the same time. At its base, flowers gather like witnesses while a tiny white horse steps forward almost unnoticed.

That horse has become my favorite detail.

Small enough to overlook, it represents the beginning of movement. Not a dramatic departure. Not a triumphant gallop. Just the quiet willingness to take the next step.

The Two of Wands has also become deeply personal because it mirrors the beginning of Organic Tarot itself. Every collage is a decision to continue. Every card is a declaration that this body of work deserves to exist. The memoir that accompanies it, the cyanotypes, the gardens, the travel, the stories—they are no longer separate projects competing for my attention. They are branches growing from the same root.

Looking at this card reminds me that we rarely know where a chosen path will end. We simply know when it is time to leave the doorway and begin walking.

The Two of Wands isn’t asking me to have the entire map.

It is asking me to trust the direction.

And perhaps that is enough.

As Organic Tarot continues to grow card by card, I realize the deck isn’t just interpreting archetypes. It is becoming a visual journal of transformation—a record of what it means to choose your own horizon, one deliberate step at a time.

Tya Alisa Anthony

Tya Alisa Anthony is an American artist, photographer, writer, and independent curator whose work explores memory, mythology, ancestry, and the quiet ways people leave themselves behind in the objects they touch. For more than twenty years, her practice has existed at the intersection of visual research, education, and cultural storytelling, investigating resilience through the body, the landscape, historical archives, and the natural world.

Working across photography, collage, cyanotype, botanical collections, handmade books, and mixed media, Anthony approaches each body of work as an evolving archive rather than a finished statement. She is drawn to weathered photographs, heirlooms, medicinal plants, folklore, ritual objects, forgotten architecture, and the symbolic language that connects cultures across time. Her work asks how identity is preserved, transformed, and remembered.

Alongside her studio practice, Anthony has spent more than two decades building educational programs, exhibitions, and community-centered initiatives that expand access to the arts. Her leadership has helped shape institutions, mentor emerging artists, develop sustainable systems, and create spaces where creativity becomes a lifelong practice rather than a privilege.

Anthony’s artwork is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s Octopus Collection. Her work has been exhibited nationally and is held in numerous private collections.

She is currently creating Organic Tarot, a 78-card hand-collaged tarot deck and accompanying memoir that intertwines mythology, autobiography, botanical symbolism, and the archetypal journey of transformation. The project reflects the central thread running throughout her career: that art is not simply something we make—it is a way of understanding ourselves, preserving what matters, and leaving a map for those who come after us.

http://www.tyaanthony.com

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