Beyond the ashes: Isabelle Albuquerque crafts eternal narratives of feminine agency

“I struggled with the disconnect between my internal femininity and my body. It was before the internet. It was isolating, but there was the Amazonians…” From her studio on the edge of Sierra Madre, Isabelle Albuquerque reflects on her creative path, material choices, and the politics of belonging

The Familial Fire: A Catalyst for Bronze

“When we went through the ashes, the only things left were the bronze busts. Everything else was gone.” Isabelle Albuquerque recalls this scene from her studio on the edge of Sierra Madre, a quiet mountain enclave outside Los Angeles. A turning point in her trajectory came after a fire that destroyed generations of her family’s artworks: “That influenced my choice of bronze for some of my sculptures – bronze is eternal and fire‑proof. About twenty percent of art is eventually destroyed. Even with ancient art, we’re only seeing a tiny fragment of what once existed.”

This event sparked her series Orgy for 10 People in One Body. “The first sculpture was made down to the essence – the scoop of plaster, the wood. Materials hold history, permanence, fragility.” Limbs, torsos, and other corporeal elements fuse with the sculptural medium. The series title imagines a melding of multiple bodies: “orgy” becomes a metaphor for merging mythological influences and evolutionary biology.

Embracing the Body in Sympathetic Magic

Although her art appears modern – even futuristic in its use of 3‑D scanning and conceptual frameworks – Albuquerque keeps an eye on ancient ritual practice. “The materials that are used in the treatment of PTSD and trauma… The simple act of petting a cat and what that does to the nervous system. Through material, you can do something that words can’t — often, that action can’t happen otherwise.”
She incorporates human hair or fur to create tactile sculptures meant to be stroked or handled, echoing the comforting effect of an animal’s coat. This “sympathetic magic” works through embodied processes rather than intellectual reflection.

Reliquaries: Containers for Loss and Hope, and the Erotic Meadow: Blossoming Desire

Following the Orgy series, Albuquerque began exploring reliquaries – smaller, more intimate pieces with hollow interiors. Each reliquary offers a private space in which individuals can place personal grief, pain, or treasured mementos. “Italians are familiar with reliquaries, but they’re less common here. I created them after 2022 – a difficult time in the U.S. and the rest of the world – as places where people could put pain or loss inside the object to release their bodies from it. They could be dancing around the house while not throwing away the loss or pain but having a place for it.”

She is also developing an erotic meadow – a field of sculptural flowers inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Mapplethorpe. It explores how sexuality and hope are embedded in floral imagery: “I’ll be showing it in New York this spring.” Rather than focusing solely on human anatomy, she steps into the botanical world, where stems, petals, and pollen become metaphors for erotic vitality.

In the Studio: Sourcing and Respecting Materials

“When I work with wood, I travel to a lumber yard and find fallen trees. When I take hair, it’s temple hair I buy on my own. I try to work with materials that have had a life.”
Recently she worked with a 200‑year‑old redwood from Portland: “Trees have their whole story written in their rings; they are living beings. I don’t frame it as sustainability, but I respect materials as alive.”

She eschews plastic: “There’s pleasure in experiencing something in a state of not‑perfection.” Roughness becomes a liberating force that frees artist and viewer alike from the tyranny of the perfectly finished. “We can’t think about the word ‘rough’ without also thinking about sex. There’s pleasure in roughness – experiencing something unrefined. It feels freeing; it’s connected to independence. Roughness makes you feel free.”

Her embrace of the unpolished informs each sculpture. Some pieces display smooth, classical curves, while others preserve the coarse textures of burned tree bark or the irregular swell of cast bronze. She begins with live sketches or direct body casts, followed by 3‑D scans that allow her to morph, repeat, or distort forms in digital space. Sometimes she rewrites these scans by hand, printing or casting them in bronze, silicon, or wood, melding hyper‑real body details – a recognizable face or torso – with imaginative additions such as extra limbs or animalistic features.

Mythological Threads: From Amazonians to Leda

“The story of Leda and the Swan deeply fascinates me.” Albuquerque sees it as a foundational Western narrative that predates the Trojan War and captures an uneasy power dynamic – “possibly a rape, possibly a seduction.” This ambiguity resonates with the broader complexities women have faced historically; her aim is to create new works that rewrite oppressive narratives.

“A lot of my work is about creating even a real mythological timeline where we have our own agency, and we can have as much pleasure and love and wildness as we want without being punished.” Drawing from ancient traditions, she creates works that honour the body as a sacred vessel. Her sculptures reference historical depictions of goddesses, re‑interpreting them in contemporary forms to reclaim feminine agency.

Her teenage experience of a congenital condition that shaped her breasts differently from most of her peers merges with myths of the Amazonians, legendary warrior women rumoured to have a single breast. “I was born with a congenital condition where my chest was both male and female. I struggled with the disconnect between my internal femininity and my body. It was before the internet – before there was any way I could understand that experience. It was isolating. I had never seen another body like mine, except the Amazonians… and that was my real foray into mythology, where I could be held by a timeless story like that.”

A Matriarchal Tapestry of Artists

Albuquerque’s sense of lineage is handed down by female ancestors. She speaks with reverence about her family’s matriarchs: her great‑grandmother in South Africa, a traditional malouf singer; her grandmother, known for radical theatrical pieces; her mother, a visual artist; and her sister, a dancer and choreographer.

“I work so much with my own body, and my body is an extension of their bodies. I was in my mother’s body; she was in her mother’s body – we are not separate.” Over time, this generational continuum reveals itself in Albuquerque’s sculptures, in her reliance on physical forms that echo inherited traits.

Contending with Patriarchy: Sovereignty, Power, and Belonging

“I don’t think you can do anything without kind of coming up against patriarchy,” Albuquerque remarks, reflecting on the cultural environment that shapes – and often resists – her work. In a patriarchal worldview, seeing a body can trigger the impulse to own it. Her perspective, closer to a matriarchal ethos, involves recognising that “you see a body and you see how it belongs to you, and you belong to it.”

A chunk of wood or a lock of human hair is not inert matter but something living – or once living. “We belong to each other.” This idea underpins her references to the environment, intergenerational relationships, and the erotic union of bodies. The worldview becomes politically charged in a climate where bodily autonomy – particularly for women – faces legal restriction: “They’ve made abortion illegal in various states,” she notes of the evolving U.S. landscape.

Death as Ongoing Belonging

Sculpture, especially in traditional materials like bronze, possesses a temporal longevity that naturally invokes mortality. “Art is some kind of way that we contend with death,” she states, pointing to the Egyptian pyramids as literal afterlives we still visit thousands of years later. Sculpture becomes a message through time that helps us process our finite lifespans in the face of what she calls “the possibility of eternity.”

“When you’re thinking about a system of belonging – where every living thing belongs to each other – the concept of death shifts a bit. It’s hard not to laugh when people think they die alone, as if the body were one thing with a definite end and beginning. As if life was containable. Ha! We understand that the body is made up of many living entities – all the microorganisms that live within our organs whose lives continue, whose lives are indistinguishable from our own.”

“All the water in our blood. If the head is sliced off, the blood pours out and waters a flower, which blossoms with an aspect of the self from the blood. A mother can die, but her cells live on in her child, in the thoughts she has placed in her child’s mind. These thoughts become the reality of the future; so long after her heart stops beating, she is still part of the rhythm.”

Isabelle Albuquerque

Isabelle Albuquerque creates life-sized figurative sculptures cast from molds of her body,
a process through which she investigates the protean nature of identity. Each sculpture is like a physical unsolvable gesture that she refines through months of bodily exploration, similar to a dancer rehearsing a role. In the studio she might pose, photograph herself, and even choreograph movements – she calls it the drawing phase – in order to discover new forms for her pieces. Materiality: her sculptures are often rendered in classical materials like bronze, beeswax, and carved wood, which imbue them with textures.

Born in 1981 to a family of artists, she grew up surrounded by creative influences. Isabelle Albuquerque studied architecture and theater at Barnard College in New York before returning to her native Los Angeles to pursue art. Early in her career, she explored music and performance, co-founding the experimental duo Hecuba and working as a dancer and designer. These experiences instilled in her a bodily, spatial understanding of art.

Albuquerque’s sculptures, while replicating the human form, serve as vessels for mythology, metaphor, and metamorphosis. The artist mines the psychosexual resources of her subconscious, drawing on ancient mythos and art history to inform what has been called her intimate sculptural odyssey. Albuquerque’s art is also rooted in contemporary feminist and socio-political discourse, reclaiming authorship over the female body in art.

Matteo Mammoli