Isabelle Albuquerque’s Alien Spring becomes a sculptural garden where she explores plant forms in symmetry with human relationships. Imagining human life and ecology as one, her works lean into our natural beginnings and regeneration after impact. Behind Encounter in the Light of Dawn, a poem by Ariana Reines reads, “I started dreaming — after the fire — of the meadow,” a line that echoes Albuquerque’s experience of the Eaton Fires that touched near her studio in LA. Fire becomes not an ending but a moment in which destruction becomes the fertile ground for new growth.
Through bronze and patented steel, flowers are sculpted to reveal familial ties as fundamental to growth and belonging. The trilogy of Mother and Child, Sisters, and The Self realises the “umbilical stem” named in Reines’ poem which defines relationships as symbiotic and necessary to actualise the beauty of her garden. The roots of The Self sculpture are particularly striking and the leaves stand out to nourish and protect the flower’s careful form. Like her representation of family, Albuquerque understands selfhood is cultivated only through interdependence. This logic of reciprocity extends across the exhibition, allowing each piece to speak to another, as the sculptures breathe in their shared space.
Albuquerque works on what is natural and interconnected. The artist constructs a utopia of growing life, drawing on the critical ideas of one of the earliest environmentalists, Rachel Carson, to allow her exhibition to work between what is natural yet not idiosyncratic. Her references to Silent Spring underscore a warning, but also a hope of restoration.
Alien Spring includes a gesture to human impact on the natural world — Two Souls illustrates a flower growing from the pinky, a pearl replacing the pistil, there’s an intervention. The bronze, which is scorched by the artist to ignite the myriad of red, green, blue, purple, moves with the light, creating an iridescence which is both organic and futuristic. Through this radiant surface, Albuquerque questions how natural beauty can be altered, enhanced, or threatened through human touch. The exhibition cultivates a hybrid beauty through care and an attention to the vulnerability of natural life, including our own.
Albuquerque’s work reimagines life in death: Ariana Reines’ poem continues, “The flower gives birth to herself”. Seen within the intimacy of her new bronze sculptures: Encounter in the Light of Dawn, Encounter in the Light of Dusk, Encounter in Her Moonlight, their self-fulfilment demonstrates it is within our own hands to enact the change we wish to see. Albuquerque’s sculptures seem to generate their own vitality, a vision of progress that insists on its own continuance.
