I’m not a particularly mystical person, but sometimes that world crosses my path.

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to take a Design class where we were challenged to create our own version of a Major Arcana Tarot card, choosing both the card and a design style to represent it.

The Sun has always held a significant place in my life—not just as a concept, but as a tangible physical presence—so the choice was easy. From there, I had no doubt about choosing Art Deco as the primary style, as it evokes the same feeling in me that the Sun does: absolute passion.

My final design was built from an illustration created in Illustrator and refined in AI: a stained-glass window that captures the light passing through it and radiates it back out into the world.

Basing the sunburst on a stained-glass window instead of a flat sun icon gives "The Sun" its glow logic — light passing through and radiating back reads as motivated, not just decorative radial lines.

I went into The Met's open access archive looking for a textile. I found the pattern I wanted on a suit of armour instead.

Greenwich, 1586. George Clifford was Queen's Champion to Elizabeth I, and his garniture is etched and gilded with her cipher, two E's back to back, repeated across every plate from helmet to sabaton without a break. Not a badge on the chest. A repeat running over an entire body, worn by royal licence, three hundred years before any house put its initials on a bag.

So I took it off the steel and put it back on a body.

RUNNING CIPHER is one woven matrix and eight streetwear pieces cut from it, shot on Yorkshire moorland in winter with the sun never higher than eighteen degrees above the horizon. My first matrix was wrong: I kept the cipher at armour scale and it collapsed into generic damask. Enlarging it four times was what made it read as a garment print instead of wallpaper. That failed version is still sitting on the canvas next to the one that worked.

The casting carries the argument. Clifford's only child, Anne, was written out of the inheritance when her father left the northern estates to his brother. She spent thirty-eight years in court, won in 1643, and rebuilt the castles herself. The mark he borrowed from a queen is now worn by the women who took the land back.

Everything is on the canvas: the Met plates that fed the matrix, every rejected generation, the casting tests, the frames that did not make it.

Original work: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/23939

Armor Garniture of George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland. Jacob Halder, royal

workshops at Greenwich, 1586. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.130.6a–y. Open Access.

Canvas: https://app.flora.ai/view/js78s0ypjspgsg3t3pjf5xd6d98dkwrb

@floraai #FLORAMuseum

this is such a unique concept!