About the Creator
Oldest child, night-owl, skeptic, Totoro chicken yakisoba consumer, lover of the color yellow, proponent for greater access to higher education, girl who misses her dog beyond words, writer. Kara Warnke is all of these things, as well as a soon-to-be graduate of the University of Michigan with a degree in Psychology and minors in Writing and English. She dreads leaving Ann Arbor. Despite all the ups-and-downs, Warnke truly valued her college experience and couldn't imagine where she'd be without it.
About Tarot '22
Over 2020’s COVID-19 quarantine, I became increasingly interested in the way that the energy and spiritual world worked outside of the Catholic realm that I had been raised in. In my youth, anything that the church didn’t explicitly say you could use was considered to be the work of the devil himself.
In this religious rebellion phase that I still find myself in, tarot has become a way for me to understand the world around me, even if the results are sometimes coincidental. Over the course of the past two years, I’ve collected a wide variety of tarot decks, each with its own “personality” of sorts. One deck is temperamental and requires strong attention spans in order to obtain accurate readings. Another is honest but cautious. I have decks that I trust more than others, but I’m happy to indulge in the arts and readings of each.
Tarot has been a means of expression for me over the past few years through my readings, and I love to see artists express themselves through the art they put on different decks. I think that it would be a great loss for me to never connect this respect for artists and my love of tarot and make my own tarot deck. This is why I chose this medium for this project.
I wanted to somehow combine my love of tarot with another love of mine. For this reason, I chose to document my past four years as a student at the University of Michigan.
To put it simply, I’ve loved almost every moment of my time here, and if I could relive it all over again, I would in a heartbeat. I’d relive all the football games, the trips to Red Robin with my friends, the walks home from band practice, and every other joyous moment. Every moment so far deserves to be documented in some way.
In the same way, my college experience has been chaotic and less than ideal. These are, after all, unprecedented times. Nothing is the way it used to be. I lost respect for people, I spent 16 months in my hometown in the middle of my college career, Schlissel was unexpectedly fired (and we got some great memes out of it), I dropped my major program, and nothing seems like it exists in the way that it used to. So, I think we, as a community, need to talk and reflect on it all. With Tarot ‘22, I’ll be incorporating the university’s shared experiences over the past few years with my own experiences to begin a dialogue about all we’ve gone through in the past four years. I’ll be opening up a thought process on how the past influences the future. Through these cards, I aim to answer the question: how do we apply the very recent events of my own life (and the lives of those people who I share many experiences with) to shape and predict our own future? How are the past and future connected?
Through this project, I have been able to express myself in a way that I’ve never been able to before: art and its interpretation. I will have to think about my experiences and make connections to the world around me that I may have never considered before. What part of my college experience best represents the ideas of moderation, harmony, and divine timing? Outside of this project, I would never give that question much thought. Here, however, this sort of post-experience thinking is essential. I am entering a conversation with the University of Michigan community about the state of our school and the environment surrounding it. How has our University of Michigan experience shaped us? What stands out? What will be remembered? What have we forgotten? Tarot ‘22 is both a praising work, as well as a critical one.