A Day with Tabby Booth

Tabby Booth & Madeleine Allardice

3 min read

A woman in a white dress and black cowboy boots sits on a red patterned rug, chin resting on her hand, surrounded by eclectic art and decor.

Artist, Tarot Reader (sort of), Collector of Beasts, Biscuits & Stories

A couple of weeks ago, Philippa and Madeleine packed their bags and jumped on a train headed for Cornwall to visit the latest artist joining the Archivist family: Tabby Booth.

As the train crossed the Tamar and rolled into Cornwall, the clouds began to lift and the sea flickered into view. A quick morning dip and a sauna on Gylly beach (idyllic, we know), and then it was time to meet the woman herself.

Tabby’s instructions? “Drive through the petrol station, we’re the big gates on the left with the two giant swans, and you’ll find a pink bungalow.” Naturally.

A white farmhouse sink with a gold faucet and red tiled backsplash is below a wall decorated with ships in bottles, a mirror, and two art prints. A sun-design pillow is on the right.

Photography Ruby Inglehart

A person's hands painting a detailed black and white scaled tail design. One hand holds a brush, the other is adorned with rings and a fern tattoo.

Photography Ruby Inglehart

An eclectic artist's studio with a wall covered in diverse illustrations, including insects, animals, and a "JUDGEMENT" tarot card, above a wooden desk holding a ceramic bottle, a framed scorpion print, and two large framed abstract artworks in the foreground.

Photography Ruby Inglehart

The bungalow is painted the most glorious Indian pink. Her studio sits just outside, tucked against a windswept hill with sea views that make your heart ache a little. Giant doors open onto the coast, and inside: a world entirely her own. Piles of rugs. Strange and beautiful objects. Her silhouetted beasts staring out from every wall. It’s like stepping into her imagination. And luckily for us, it’s exactly as weird and wonderful as we hoped it would be.

Coffee is poured, incense is lit, and we begin unboxing the treasures we’ve been working on together: a brand new series of letterpress matchboxes and cards, printed by our team back at the studio. Tabby sees them for the first time — her Open matchbox with black matches, featuring a whimsical full moon face on a starry dark background. Moon, An open matchbox with white-tipped matches and a black cover featuring a gold sun with a face and red cheeks. Sun, A red matchbox with a black and gold lion design, filled with black matches with white tips. Lion and An open matchbox with a black silhouette of a three-masted ship and birds on a brown cover, revealing black matches with white tips. Ship designs, pressed lovingly into paper and board, in all their bold, black-and-gold glory.

A hand rests near a large matchbox featuring a sailing ship. On a distressed table, a tray holds smaller matchboxes, one with a moon face, another with a lion, and various decorative trinkets.

Photography Sarah Francis Kelly

Her signature black silhouettes, part illustration, part folk art, are instantly recognisable: beasts, lobster claws, the curling waves of the sea. Her work feels both ancient and modern, timeless and strange. The images are simple, but the textures are rich, created using the sgraffito technique, which involves scratching through layers to reveal something beneath. (We like to think letterpress and sgraffito are distant cousins — both obsessive, tactile, slightly chaotic printing methods that leave a glorious mess behind.)

Inside the house, the pink continues. Every room is its own little story, layered with trinkets, colours, biscuit moulds and objects with past lives. On the floor sits an enormous carved foot. On the wall, a giant eye. She shows us a hand-painted Tarot book she created when she was pregnant with her son — a full reinterpretation of the classic deck, filled with her own mythical, expressive figures. We bond over our shared love of collecting things: letters, blocks, cards, rituals.

A notebook with a hand-drawn 'The World' Tarot card and notes, alongside other fanned Tarot cards and colored pencils on a wooden surface.

It’s this spirit, bold, mysterious, charmingly odd, that threads its way through the Tabby Booth x Archivist collection. A Red lobster illustration on a white, lobster-shaped card. lobster here, a A red matchbox with a black and gold lion design, filled with black matches with white tips. lion there, a An open matchbox with a black silhouette of a three-masted ship and birds on a brown cover, revealing black matches with white tips. ship setting out to sea. These are objects that feel like they’ve come from a different time, but are very much for now.

We’re thrilled to welcome Tabby into our merry band of artists and we hope her work brings a little wildness and wonder to your home too.