A woman’s figure is twisted and distorted, a reflection of the acrobatics she goes through to conceive (the grueling process of infertility treatment), to give birth, and to mother. She honors her first child while hoping for another, represented by the gold leaf silhouette in her engorged belly. The orb above indicates the stages of uterine growth in pregnancy, marking these passages of time as yet another set of goals to attain. The title comes from a speech given by the great author Ursula LeGuin, who was also a mother, in her call to make women’s experiences heard:
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change.”