Peg Kerr's Journal

I do not like this card. I am not sure whether it's because it's powerful enough to hook into an uncomfortable subject matter, or I'm not pleased with it aesthetically. Perhaps both.

(Plus I lost one of my tools while making it in the hodgepodge of all my folders of images: my burnisher, which I use to press the collage down on the matt boards. Which is extremely annoying.)


Anxiety - Committee/Council Suit
I am the One who is always flinching back from imagined terrors both real and unreal. I live my life in a constant state of apprehension and misery.

I can clearly see the shadow side of this card: if you are familiar with the myth of the sword of Damocles, the person the sword hangs over is powerful. Yet I feel powerless in this card. I threw in a hodgepodge of my standard terrors. I notice that many of them come from above...the sensation that an anvil is about to descend out of the sky, perhaps. The similarity of the pose of the bat and the girl pleases me. It is said that bats are just as afraid of us as we are of them (personally, they just make me come unglued).

The deatheater mask (Bellatrix Lestrange's) really should have been the Dark Mark in the sky, but I didn't have a good picture of that. Still: the deatheater masks were meant to sow anxiety and terror.

It was an uncomfortable card to make. I can't decide whether I'm displeased with it because I would have preferred the Dark Mark to the deatheater mask or because, I dunno, the sort of posed sense that the whole thing has. All the characters in the card are looking out at the audience, rather than reacting to one another.

(The girl with the steel pot over her head reminds me of the Bobs' song about Helmets, which you can hear here. The whole point of wearing a helmet, the Bobs tell us, is that it keeps you calm.)

Perhaps it just a poor choice for a card to make before starting a new work week. Nevertheless, it was the card that needed to be made.

What do you think?

This is a bridge card between two suits, Committee (aspects of myself) and Council (archetypes). This one is related to an earlier card I made, The Voluptuary. Where the Voluptuary, too, is extremely sensual, her sexuality is more benign, and has to do with herself. The Femme Fatale's sexuality is other directed, more calculating: she's thinking of it as a weapon she can use. She may enjoy sex, (and both the Voluptuary and the Femme Fatale are very good at it) but she may be more contemptuous of her partner. The Voluptuary seems to me to be more a purely Committee card.

Femme Fatale - Committe/Council Suit I am the One who is exotic, sophisticated, sensual and dangerous. I use my sexuality as a weapon. I always get what I want.