One Of Many Souls II

By Jeremy Vander Noord

ARTIST STATEMENT

"A volcano is a mountain of contradictions—solid yet fluid, destruction and creation entwined. Grief for a place left behind is much the same, an eruption of longing and loss, burning hot beneath the surface even as life carries on above. The magma deep within is the molten ache of having left before readiness, before roots could be loosened gently.

Yet there is also light in the eruption. Lava, though it destroys, also reshapes. It hardens into new land, unfamiliar but full of possibility. The darkness of ash and the brightness of flame are inseparable, just as the pain of departure and the promise of arrival are woven together.

Migration is its own kind of volcanic force—pushed by pressure, pulled by necessity, the home that was is layered into the foundation of the home that will be. And though the mountain trembles, though the earth cracks open, I am learning that something enduring remains: the knowledge that home is not a single place but the land we build from what we bring with us.

I am a first generation Australian born to Dutch parents. This metaphor, the Volcano, speaks to me of my parents' experience of leaving and arriving. It is my experience also, after living in, and leaving, their homeland. I returned to a life that now felt smaller. My figures evolve as I make them. They are elemental, made from the earth, their souls manifesting once created, each one expanding my new understanding of home.

I look to the myth of the volcano to imbue morality, nature and creation into forms both archetypal and elementary."

BIO

Big pictures and small details are the operandi of Jeremy Vander Noord. After many years living in NYC Jeremy has returned to country Victoria with a deep reflection on his multidisciplinary art practice that has involved printmaking, leatherwork and textiles, jewellery, painting, photography and sculpture.