Playing cards are designed to be shuffled. Their purpose is chance. Most decks are used, worn, and replaced. A few become collectables. Almost none become a finished artwork that can never be made the same way again.

That is the idea behind these assemblages.

Each work begins with a complete premium deck — often Bicycle or Theory11, sometimes an official film, comic, or television edition. The deck is shuffled thoroughly. The process is recorded so the outcome can be verified. Then every card is mounted, by hand, onto an A1 board in the exact order the shuffle produced.

The mathematics matters. A standard deck has 52 cards. The number of possible orders is 52 factorial: 52 × 51 × 50 down to 1. That is not 52 possible results. It is a number so large that repeating the same sequence is, in practical terms, impossible. The finished piece is therefore not a design that can be reprinted. It is one physical record of one moment.

Colour is part of the composition, not decoration added later for effect alone. In the Inimitable: Fantasy series, contrast or complementary spray — red, gold, deep green, silver, sunset yellow — sits across the mosaic and answers the world of each deck: 007, Spider-Man, Batman, Avatar, Star Trek, The Lion King, Wicked, Willy Wonka, Peaky Blinders, and others. The cards remain real. The arrangement remains unique. The surface becomes a field rather than a grid of souvenirs.

These works sit between assemblage, mosaic, and conceptual art. They are built for the wall: textured, one-off, and meant to be seen in person. They are not posters and not editions. If the same deck were shuffled again tomorrow, the result would be a different artwork.

The Inimitable: Fantasy series can be seen in person at The Other Art Fair, London, 8–11 October 2026. Further works and process notes are at deckofart.com.