People ask this a lot, usually when they first see a board in person or on a screen. The short answer is no, I don’t make the cards. They are real premium decks — Bicycle, Theory 11, and some of the licensed ones (Wicked, Avengers, the Star Wars sets, that sort of thing). I buy them, shuffle them properly, and then hand-assemble every single card onto the A1 rigid board.

I used to think about designing my own cards early on. It felt like the obvious next step. Then I realised that would change the whole point. If I printed the cards myself, the work would just be another designed surface. What interests me is taking something that already exists in the world — an ordinary deck that anyone can buy — and freezing one order that will never happen again. The cards stay recognisable as cards. You can still read the pips and the faces when you stand close. That directness matters.

So the art isn’t in manufacturing the deck. It’s in the selection, the authentic shuffle (I record it), and the slow assembly that locks the sequence in place. Once the glue is dry the piece only exists once. No prints later. The certificate lists the exact order so it can be checked.

When curators or collectors visit the studio in West London they usually pick up on this quickly. They see the slight differences between decks — the thickness of the Bourbon ones, the finish on the neon sets — and they understand that nothing has been custom-printed to look like cards. The material is genuine. That seems to settle the question better than any explanation.

If you’re looking at the work and wondering whether the cards are “real,” they are. I just decide which deck to use and then let the shuffle decide the rest.