CARMEN SORRENTI
 
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Carmen Cassandra Sorrenti


Alchemical artist - poet - researcher

Carmen was born in Positano, Italy, where she grew up with an Australian mother and a group of international artists who taught her to draw at an early age. After training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London and undergoing a Noh Theatre apprenticeship in Japan with Naohiko Umewaka, she worked as an actress in various theatre companies, at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York and opposite John Turturro in Secret Passage. Once ready, due to profound dream experiences and retreats with Cristobal Jodorowsky, she turned to painting and writing in order to have the fullest possible freedom in co-creating with the dreaming. She supported this change with studies at Liz Greene’s Centre for Psychological Astrology, which included an in depth approach to Jung, alchemy and mythology.

Carmen’s Moon painting won the Premio Giorgione for alchemical art, and though exhibitions include galleries in Florence, Rome, Positano, Genova, Pescara, London, Vienna, New Mexico, Boston and Salem, most of her energy turned to creating the Pholarchos Tarot, a poetic deck based on dream incubation. She is currently writing the Pholarchos Manual: Poetics of Daily Alchemy as a prompt to enhance creative approaches to dreamwork, alchemy and individuation. In May 2023 she completed an MA with Mathew Mather, Lyn Mather, and Martina Cleary at TUS (LSAD), Ireland. This was the pioneer group of: Art, Psyche and the Creative Imagination, where under the umbrella of Susan Rowland’s Jungian Arts-Based Research, she devised a new research method: Sounding the Dream. She is the featured artist in the 2023 Fall issue of Quadrant: The Journal of the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology.

Art. Dreamwork. Alchemy. Tarot. Poetic Inquiry. Performance.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

I have always been hounded by questions. I once played Philomele in Love of the Nightingale where I was turned into the eponymous bird because I ‘asked too many questions’. This was fitting, though in my own life the metamorphosis did not reduce the seeking but simply made the questions more lyrical, a kind of oracular song. Song may be literal or a song of the soul and blueprint of one’s nature. My name does mean song / poem in Latin, a nomen omen, and so I push the explorations out through these rippling vibrations. My main interests are alchemy and building a relationship with the dreaming realms through paint and poetry thus expanding a sense of meaning.

Photo bu Anne-Marie Killeen


ALCHEMY & THE ETERNAL BODY


The Pholarchos Tarot is one of the most exciting, and profound, new decks I have seen in years.
— Rachel Pollack, author of: Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
This deck is a work of art and a vehicle for the imagination to go wild. The only way to experience it is to plunge in and work with it yourself. It is a deck which works on very many levels, but most of all Carmen encourages each of us to follow our dreams and as the Sun card instructs, “Whatever you do in this life, find your essence and be true to it.
— Juliet Sharman-Burke, author of: The Mythic Tarot
Pholarchos deck powerfully moves us into depths unknown!
— C. MIchael Smith, author of: Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue
Pholarchos has really taken our whole house by storm. I am a tarot scholar who wrote a thesis on tarot hermeneutics and this is definitely one of the most amazing decks I have seen of the 100+ I’ve collected or else witnessed in person
— Cybele Brandow, director of the Maine Jung Center
 

THE TOWER CARD FROM THE PHOLARCHOS TAROT