.jpg)
“Think of a question, but don’t tell me what it is,” Pamela Love instructs me via Zoom. She’s in Los Angeles, while I’m in New York, and the intention is that we are going to meet on some astral plane as she reads my Tarot—to tap, as Love puts it, “into your energy and work it into the cards.” We’re doing a three-card pull using The Infinite Door, a new Tarot deck of Love’s own design in collaboration with the artist Krys Maniecki. From her earliest days, Love’s jewelry—talismanic, spiritual, mystical—was inspired by her belief that it would hold some deeper connection with its wearer beyond mere embellishment, and having her own Tarot deck is similarly attuned to that notion.
Love reads her own cards regularly, stressing that the exercise is not and has never been about, she says, “fortune-telling: You pull a particular card and it will tell you you’re going to die. The cards are for introspection; they’re tools for looking inward.” Indeed, she’ll often use the Tarot as a means of going inwards to mull over, and make, decisions, something she has done since she was a teenager. As she is telling me this, Love is shuffling her deck, waiting for me to say “stop”—which I do, when the time feels right: Ahh, stop. (This, after being told to close my eyes for a minute and focus on the here and now of my life—an experience I usually can’t bear for much longer than nanoseconds.)
“I’m going to pull the top three cards,” Love says. “OK. OK. Very interesting: This is a great past, present, future spread.” That sounds good, I tell her. “For the first card, you pulled the Ace of Pentacles,” she says, holding it up for me to see; it features a serpent-ringed hand holding aloft an encircled Pentagram. “This card represents your past,” Love tells me. “The Pentacles typically represent money or worldly possessions. Pulling the Ace of Pentacles: The card represents a time in your life when you had a new financial or career opportunity. Sometime in your past, you had an incredible jump-start, and that takes you to the present…”
She holds up the second card, which depicts a pink hand being engulfed by a snake as the hand’s five tendril-like wands, for fingers, point skywards. “Wands are about creativity and passion—ideas—but fives… fives are not good cards,” she says. “I know: Everyone only wants good cards….” No, no, I say—I want to hear it all. “...but they’re great tools. The Five of Wands represents a struggle, a creative struggle—or a power struggle, or a power imbalance. You might feel like there’s a snake almost nipping at you, that you’ve lost something creatively and spiritually. Your best way forward is taking the path of least resistance. But it’s OK, because….”
Love holds up the third and final card: A pendant-draped hand pierced by a wand. “This is the Ace of Wands, a lovely card. It’s basically saying you are about to embark on a new incredible creative endeavor that is ripe with opportunities, but you have to let go of what’s happening now.” At this point I tell Love what my question was: What’s going to happen next in my life? “This is where you’re going next,” she says, holding up that third card again. “The Ace of Wands is an insanely good card.”
As to where Love is going next, her Tarot deck The Infinite Door—based, she tells me, on the classic 1909 deck, the Rider-Waite Tarot—is part of a creative resurgence she is feeling, and a move away from branded avarice and corporatized luxe flashiness of our current moment in favor of something that feels more eternal and personal and intimate. It’s perfect for Love, whose jewelry design has long been an act of empathetic expression. “That was always the intention,” she says. “It’s interesting to be creating that kind of work, because with social media there can be a sameness to everything—and we’re not about that. My work—I like to think of it as an embrace.”
What people are drawn to from Pamela Love are pieces that feel commemorative of feeling, with ceremonial importance—pieces like her exquisite fine jewelry engagement and wedding rings, perhaps with brilliant- or marquise-cut diamonds mounted into braided 18k yellow gold bands (her gold is recycled, the diamonds ethically sourced). There are more everyday pieces too, which bear her distinct way with design—her trademark dagger or hand pendants, the palm bearing a heart-shaped ruby—as well as a new addition to her oeuvre, a range of sterling silver pieces, like a chunky hammered ring or the tiny perfume amulet hanging from a silken cord. And while they seem to draw inspiration from ancient forms of adornment, Love’s jewelry very much feels of today.
.jpg)
Likewise that Tarot deck of hers. “I created it with Krys, along with the book that goes with it”— the accompanying text lays out the meaning of each and every card—“because I want people to have the power to read for themselves. And I wanted them to have a deck that feels like it resonates with the archetypes and aesthetics of now, as much as I love the 1909 Rider-Waite version. I’d like this Tarot deck to be as meaningful to others as it is to me.”