“Volcanoes are apertures, where one world’s truth spills into another,” says artist Wanda Orme
inspired by the Salton Sea – a shallow body of saline water stretching on the San Andreas Fault in California – Orme took her craft to the south of Italy.
Having temporarily relocated to Naples between 2018 and 2021, Orme immersed herself in the mystical energy of Mount Vesuvius and the volcanic islands of Alicudi and Pantelleria. That same energy now echoes through the pages of her new booka collection of photographs and poems that questions the artist’s – and our own – relationship to the earth and its unrestrainable power.
Comprising 24 dreamy images and the same number of poems, the volume was carefully designed so as to look like “something born of the volcano itself.” In, Orme’s experience of Southern Italy is translated into vivid imagery and moving text capable of breathing new life into the inactive cavities of Mount Vesuvius. Here, Orme reflects on Naples and the power of its landscape.
“Is this kind of power hard to love, or is an appreciation of this power exactly what we should be striving for? It’s something very real and honest; a world which both disregards and holds us, a world which does not belong to us but which we belong to. Volcanoes exist despite us, completely beyond the human realm. They remind us that this planet is not ours, but that we belong to the earth.”“There is a humility and an audacity which comes with living on the slopes of a volcano.