HI,
I’M KATIE.
A self-taught visual artist, writer, Tarot creator, and therapist based in Tucson, Arizona.
My most recent project, Medicinal Tarot, is a 78-card Tarot deck created over a year and a half, much of it during an acute health crisis. The original artwork for the deck was made entirely by hand using paper collage and flora.
Making the deck was a slow, tactile process of cutting, arranging, layering, and working intuitively with imagery and materials.
Individual pieces sometimes took many hours to complete, and the finished deck retains the organic variations that emerge through making by hand. The first edition of the deck was printed locally in Tucson at The Gloo Factory.
I work primarily in paper collage and botanical materials, a technique that emerged through curious experimentation. My writing has developed through many years of study and community at The Writers Studio Tucson. My creative work often explores themes of grief, trauma, healing, and integration, and the ways these experiences intersect with love and the natural world.
I create my art intuitively, working primarily with paper collage and botanical materials.
THE MEDICINAL TAROT DECK
I began creating this deck for myself in March of 2025. At the time, I had no plans to share it with the world. I was in the midst of a sudden and acute illness: my health had rapidly declined and many of my relationships had dissolved.
I felt alone and unmoored as so many familiar things in my life fell away. Creating Medicinal Tarot became a refuge—a place to create in the midst of loss, and to feel alive even when much of what I loved had become inaccessible to me.
For a year and a half, I immersed myself in the visceral joy and challenge of making images that spoke to me in a language beyond language. The practice became a kind of meditation: a familiar refuge that brought me comfort and joy while continually surprising me with images that seemed to reveal themselves as I made them.
I spent countless hours pouring myself into these images, and they nourished me.