A Cornish Pixie explores the mystery and magic of tarot cards through an architectural lens, taking inspiration from the most well-known set, which was designed in 1909 by the artist and mystic, Pamela Colman Smith, or “Pixie”.

Pixie’s cards are the design method through which the designer, positioned as an ‘architectural witch’, performs a ‘reading’ of the North Cornish site of Boscastle and its attendant climate-precarity, its history of salvage and magic, its coastal liminality, and the collection of the existing Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.

As the guardian spirit of this project, Pixie’s work is a strong influence. Through theatre, we may experience magic as a designed and curated spatial performance, and similarly, this project aims to embody the theatricality of tarot readings. Tarot readings can be thought of as a way of re-contextualising the past and present, to form ideas and questions, and explore stories about what’s to come. As such, similar considerations of the site and the magical history associated with the Museum’s collection influence the beginning of an iterative remembering of a history and a place in which unpredictability is constant.