People want to know if the shuffle is proper or if I just move the cards around until they look right. Its a fair question. The short answer is that I shuffle them the way you would shuffle any deck — properly, more than once, and I film it.

I use ordinary techniques. Riffle mostly, sometimes a faro if the deck is new and the edges are still sharp. Nothing theatrical. I do it on the table in the studio, phone propped up so the whole thing is recorded from the moment I start until the cards are squared again. That video is what proves the order is the one that actually came out of the shuffle, not something I arranged afterwards. Once the recording is done I don’t touch the sequence. I just start laying the cards down in the order they landed.

Is it random? As random as any thorough shuffle gets. I don’t stop and reshuffle if a run of the same suit appears or if the jokers end up next to each other. Those things happen. With some decks more than others. The Bourbon ones are stiff and don’t mix as easily. The thinner Bicycle decks run smoother. I just keep going until the deck feels properly mixed, then I stop. The mathematics behind 52! means that even a decent shuffle is almost certainly producing an order that has never existed before. I don’t need to do anything extra to chase that.

When curators come to the studio in West London they sometimes ask to see the footage. Its just a phone video, nothing polished. They watch the cards move and then look at the finished board and the order matches. That usually settles it. The randomness isn’t a claim I make after the fact — its the starting point, and the rest of the work is just fixing what already happened.

If the shuffle had been arranged the boards would look cleaner and more deliberate. They don’t always. Some of them have awkward clusters or big empty stretches of one colour. I leave them. Thats the piece.