In the beginning Eurynome, the Goddess of all things, emerged naked from Chaos to find nothing solid on which to rest her feet: she then divided the sea from the sky and wove a dance across the waves. Still dancing she moved southwards and for her the wind blowing at her back was something quite new and unexpected. And so she decided to join with it in the act of creation.
Turning suddenly, she grasped hold of the North Wind and rubbing it between her hands created the wind serpent Ophion.
Eurynome continued to dance to keep herself warm. Her abandoned rhythm inflamed the passion of Ophion, who enveloped Eurynome with his sighs and coupled with her.
Now the north wind also known as Boreas is a fertilising wind: often mares, exposed to that wind, conceive foals without the aid of the stallion. And so it was that Eurynome became pregnant.
(‘Pelasgian creation myth’ in The Greek Myths by R. Graves 1954).

It is this relationship of the Goddess/Woman with the elements that Evelien La Sud investigates, with total commitment, and with her inexhaustible passion as a woman and an artist. It is however a relationship that western civilization (of which the art system is the most poisonous flower), almost completely destroyed and overturned. This system which has succeeded in prevailing over all others, and has managed to discover the antitoxins for its own regeneration - the AIDS of the Empire, as Vallauri defined it. So Evelien La Sud seeks to re-establish the elemental relationship; both by physically working with the earth, which represents for her and for her work as an artist an essential medium, as when she uses and transforms materials, which she elaborates with reference to ancient mythologies and to anthropology. These she links to the tradition of woman’s life, to her involvement in daily (universal) existence. She draws on simple materials, on ready-mades, on substances grounded in nature (earthenware, copper, glass, cloth...) rediscovering female creativity there and new alchemical reactions, urging them, once again, to react in a ‘natural’ way with the elements. Water (Eurynome’s dance on the waves is Evelien entrusting her work to the flow of the river); the wind (that drove Eurynome from behind and which spurred her to embark of the act of creation, is that same wind to which Evelien abandons her compass of the winds hung from a veil, saving it from oblivion? ... ).

It is the gesture of Eurynome, who grasped the north wind and rubbed it between her hands bringing forth its fertilising power, mirrored in Evelien’s handing over her work to the water and the wind.
It is though at the same time the confident and totalizing gesture of the hands held over the book by Giovanni Chellini, Donatello’s doctor, in his funerary monument in the cathedral of
San Miniato. Also the disruptive gesture of St Galgano when at his horse’s third rearing,
he thrust the sword into the stone, marking the spot where the abbey would be built, now a precious relic standing open to the elements.

These were the constant ideal reference points for Evelien La Sud.

Translated in English by Heather Mackay Roberts