ISABELLE ALBUQUERQUE

Mother and Child is the inaugural work in Isabelle Albuquerque’s latest series, the Meadow, in which she envisions a landscape of hybrid human-floral forms tracing the parallels between cultural and ecological evolution. The sculpture, a stainless steel human-orchid figure, features an intricate root system that probes themes of generational knowledge, symbiosis, empathy, and the chemical exchanges between generations.

Originally conceived for an exhibition placing Albuquerque’s practice in dialogue with Louise Bourgeois, the work re-contextualizes the art historical theme of mother and child through new forms possessing organic, render-like precision that collapse the hierarchies between the human and non-human, the organic and the artificial, and reality and science fiction. In her mother and child, Albuquerque was especially interested in the expression of microchimerism and women as chimeras that hold the genetic material from both their parents and children - a kind of simultaneous state - that reaches both into the past and future. The materiality of the sculpture further reifies this pluralism. Advancing her “multitudinal” material logic, Albuquerque treats stainless steel to contain the luminosity and shifting aesthetics of glazed ceramic while retaining the industrial strength and durability of the metal. These uprooted, seemingly ephemeral blooms are, paradoxically, forged in time with the permanence of steel. For its presentation at Piece Unique, Mother and Child grows out of a mound of fresh earth, continuing to bridge the rendered and the natural world. A single pearl blossoming from each orchid deepens these metamorphic forms as potent signifiers of desire and further enacts an allegorical process, eternalizing expressions of exchange, regeneration and renewal across multiple species and temporal registers.

Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO.