In Your Skin

As a child, Isabelle Albuquerque would accompany her mother, Lita Albuquerque, around the world as she staged ephemeral earthworks in which luminous color appears like strokes of a paintbrush across the land. She’d shadow her with awe as Lita dug into desert earth, filled trenches with natural pigments, and painted. At home, Isabelle would watch her younger sister, Jasmine Albuquerque, dance, developing her very own practice. Soon, Isabelle began to experiment on the stage herself, before eventually turning her actions into physical artifacts. Today, performance pulses through each Albuquerque’s practice. (Jasmine, now a choreographer and dancer, became the movement director for her mother and sister.) There is a sense that their creations are the products of secret cosmic happenings that occur beforehand: The body at work laying pigment or moving orbs. The body twisting until it lands in the right pose for a sculpture. The body in motion. Ineffable, save for the forms it leaves behind.

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Before doubles of her own figure sprawled out and crouched, frozen in ecstacy across gallery rooms, Isabelle, 43, saw herself as an archivist of her now-79-year-old mother’s work. When everything the family owned was lost to Los Angeles’ Woolsey fire in 2018, she rose from the ashes as a force of her own and by the next year debuted her first series, “Orgy for Ten People in One Body.” To make the figurative sculptures, Isabelle painstakingly poses her own body, casts it, and transforms it into various materials, from walnut to metal to wax. The results are deeply personal, erotic, playful, and otherworldly. In Flower for Paris, 2024, a wildflower sprouts up from a burnt beach log, its metal petals made from a scan of her own vulva. In Orgy for Ten People in One Body: 9, 2022, a kneeling headless bronze figure holds a shaker broom between her legs, her back arched as if she is going to take off in flight. Every detail holds a story that exists around the sculpture like an invisible membrane: She wears a gold wedding band, and the undersides of her feet and arms are coated in ash as if she had been crawling through the scorched earth. These are artifacts for all Isabelle holds and all that came before her. She looks at the feet of her forms and sees her mother.

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Among Isabelle’s family of female artists—her grandmother was a playwright and her great-grandmother was a celebrated singer—there is a mercurial energy that persists and settles into the new forms of each generation. It was never easy, Isabelle and Lita both concur. To be an artist, and a woman artist at that, is to fight to create while confronting traumas and setting out onto new frontiers. Multiple people in one body. Ideas outside of space and time. A physicality emanates from within Lita’s site-specific installations and sculptures and reverberates in her daughter’s molds of her own form, alchemized and, now, abstracted into sensually charged flowers. Today, metal stems poke out from the cracks in Isabelle’s concrete floor.

Lita Albuquerque: It’s 3:39 p.m. in your new studio, the Firehouse #2, in Sierra Madre, in the county of Los Angeles, in the state of California, in the United States of America, in the continents of the Americas, in the Northern Hemisphere of our planet Earth. Third planet from our Sol star, our solar system nestled on the edge of the Orion Arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Next to our Milky Way galaxy is the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, within the Local Supercluster, known as Laniakea. In Hawaiian, Laniakea means “immense heaven,” and con-tains hundreds of thousands of galaxies. We stay here for a moment. Go to our Milky Way galaxy where, nestled on the inner edge of Orion’s Arm, is our solar system and our planet Earth, third from our Sol star. We go into the Northern Hemisphere, into the Americas, into the United States of America and to the state of California, the grid of Los Angeles, the town of Sierra Madre, your studio on Alta Vista Drive at 3:41 p.m. It has only taken us two minutes to place us in our reality of space and time. Here we are.

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‍Isabelle Albuquerque: Here we are. Whenever I think about your work, I think of looking upward-out. You see the whole planet as a drawing surface. What you’re really doing is aligning the body in the cosmos, aligning the body in the moment, aligning the body in community, which is what I do, too, but in a totally differ-ent way. There’s something about that exercise that speaks to how I’m influenced by you. I often think about my work as making a feral timeline, which to me is a very sci-fi idea: You take an idea and you put it through time and space outside of the history we have. I see my “Orgy” [series] as a timeline in which women are totally empowered, where you’re objec-tified and the objector at the same time. Subject and object are the same. A reclining nude is not about power over the body but power from inside the body coming out. And then, in a really different way, you also create these feral time-lines into the future. You’re making a trilogy of sci-fi films right now. How did that begin?

‍LA: The story is about a 25th-century female astronaut. It came to me in 2003, but it wasn’t until 10 years later that I started developing the characters—these starkeepers who come down to the planet whenever they’re touched at the soles of their feet. I made the first film, 20/20: Accelerando, in Hawaii in 2016. Liquid Light, the second film, was shot in Bolivia on the Salt Flats in 2018 and shown at the Venice Biennale in 2022. The third film is in development, and it’s going to be called Everything Is Light. Jasmine plays the 25th-century astronaut in the trilogy. I collaborate with her in my work often—whether I sculpt, do installations, or films, it’s her.

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IA: I think the mother-daughter relationship is probably one of the most sci-fi relationships there is. I mean, think of microchimerism, how my cells are still in you. Or how every time I drank from your breast, you would produce new kinds of milk for what I needed at the time. There’s nothing more sci-fi than that. We have a matriarchy: my great-grandmother, grandmother, you, me, and my sister. It is pretty rare in this particular period in human history that as women we can all be artists. Our family itself feels like part of a feral timeline. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how you are situated between your mother and me: Here’s your mom who was writing these pretty intense, erotic plays, and your daughter making an “Orgy” and also working in eroticism, and you’re thinking in a different, more spiritual way. What does it feel like to be smashed against that possibly uncomfortable place as both a mother and daughter?

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LA: Wow. That’s not something I’ve thought about, but interestingly enough I think it’s easier to answer that about my mother than it is with you. Her eroticism and her sexuality weren’t apparent when I was growing up because she hid it. She was a lesbian in a time that you could not be.

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IA: You really didn’t know at all? When did you find out?

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LA: When I was 25. Her story was really extraordinary, and I don’t know if she told me everything. She was a playwright living in Paris in the underground lesbian scene in the late ’30s. When the war broke out in 1939, she went back to Tunisia to be with her mother, who was dying. Her mother said, “No, Ferida, you go,” and encouraged her to follow her dream to go to Hollywood. She traveled through North Africa to Lisbon to take a boat to America. While she was waiting, she met and fell in love with a couple from Paris, a diamond dealer and his wife, on their way to Brazil. They followed her out to Los Angeles, where they all lived together for five years.

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IA: So you basically saw your mom as a single woman, because she left both the husband and the wife soon after you were born… How did she keep that secret from you for 25 years? Did you know about your dad?

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LA: Oh, of course I knew about him.

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IA: But did you know about his wife?

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LA: I knew about her, but I didn’t know that my mother was in love with her.

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IA: Do you think she kept it hidden to protect you guys? To protect herself? To hide such a huge part of herself from you...

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LA: She had to hide that… It was complicated. I was just trying to figure out why we were so messed up and why things were so hard.

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IA: Last Saturday, I was having an intense weekend, and I spent the night at your house, which I had never done before in my adult life. I woke up in the morning, and you came in and said, “I’ve been crying all morning.” And I said, “Was it your mother?” And you said yes. And it’s like, Of course. Right? You’re 78, and you’re still working on yourself. We have such closeness, but it’s still one of the most intense relationships. And it’s not just us; It’s also my grandmother, her mother, and my sister—this very entangled, warm, and beautiful connection. But it’s not without complexity. So much of it is holding that complexity, and that’s in my work a lot. I mean, when I use my own body, it is from your body. So you are in every single piece. I really see you in the feet and in the hands. I see my sister, I see my grandma. I think of it as part of a long strand of DNA. You’re not necessarily a singular entity, you’re multiple people in one body, which is what my work is about. It’s the same with the work that you do. It’s all so relational.

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LA: I think that’s the beauty of going deep. I had a therapy appointment right as you were waking up, and it was really intense. But the deeper you get, it’s fantastic because you can be your true self.

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IA: Growing up, you would take me on all your work trips around the world to sacred sites. I used to watch you out there with bags of pigment, using the land as a piece of paper. It’s incredible that that is one of my first memories of you. You were literally digging trenches, really living. It has had a huge influence on me.

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LA: I remember in March 1980, I did this automatic writing, and it said, “Tumultuous events are about to happen. A feminine force is trying to come through you. You will find her at the right side of the apex of a red triangle.” Then in June, I was asked to participate in the International Sculpture Conference with an ephemeral work, The Washington Monument Project: the Red Pyramid. I traced the shadow of the monument as it fell due west, due north, and due east. I dug up the trench and filled it with red pigment, and someone climbed up inside the Washington Monument and took a picture of the installation. In the photo, you can see a person on the right side of the apex of a red triangle on the ground. That person ended up being your father. So this feminine force that was trying to come through me was you, totally. I’m very connected to who you are. I hold my children with such wonder: Life is so much more powerful than anything we can ever imagine, and then you have these human beings that come out of you, but they’re not you. They are their own beings. It’s really sacred.

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IA: It is pretty special to have that kind of point of view. The Washington Monument piece is one of my favorite pieces. And also, it’s basically a phallus going into a vagina.

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LA: Talk about sexual.

IA: It is hands-down your most erotic work. Maternal energy is the same as creative energy. You were receiving an idea that became the piece, but you were also receiving a daughter. It’s the birthing energy. When I’m making a work, I always feel that I’m in a birth. You have been able to hold the creativity very strongly for decades, plus three children. You’ve had thousands of births.

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LA: Yeah, that’s true. Well, I do remember that when you were born [in 1981], I didn’t want to do anything else. It was the most amazing thing ever.

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IA: I think it happens a lot, but we had love at first sight.

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LA: Yes, and I was very protective, but I had all these shows lined up, so I never stopped my career.

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IA: I was told by an assistant from when my brother [Christopher Peck] was born that you were working during the birth, to give a sense of the magnitude of the creative force you are. You have magnificent energy. To be able to care for your children and support yourself through art, in your time… It’s extraordinary. You never slept. Did your mom support you?

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LA: There were two instances. The first instance was when I was doodling when I was 8, and she took it out of my hands and said, “Oh my God! This is genius!” It totally froze me. I couldn’t understand what that meant. I mean, you’d think I’d be happy but it was like...

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IA: Too much for a child.

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LA: Then it wasn’t repeated. It wasn’t, “Hey, let’s give you lessons. Let’s take you to art school.” I didn’t have any of that. The second instance was this really amazing thing: She was a writer, and she was very much a critical thinker before her breakdown. I had a show at Dorothy Goldeen Gallery on Main Street in Santa Monica in 1995, titled “Particle Memory,” and she wrote the most beautiful review of it. Those were the only instances. She just didn’t have the bandwidth to be able to see what I needed. It was all about her. It was hard because she had been so talented and successful before I was born. So when I had you and Jasmine, I did what most parents do: I wanted to be a dancer, so I really pushed you to be dancers and always made sure I had money for lessons.

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IA: And now Jasmine dances in your films. I sometimes say my whole childhood was just watching her dance, which obviously has affected my work so much.

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LA: She’s part of both of our work.

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IA: Those lessons you wanted from your mom are a gift that keeps giving.

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LA: That was really important to me. And you were interested in so many things. You were a major nature lover and loved horses. It was kind of foreign to me how wonderful you were with animals.

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IA: Most of my relationships when I was a child and teenager were with animals. I would work with my aunt, who had a foundation where she raised money to purchase horses from slaughterhouses and take care of them. In my case, I took care of a beautiful Arabian mare. Her feet had been completely rotted out, and she had been abused—horses store all their trauma in their feet—so I would bathe her feet in Epsom salts for years to get her strength back. I always think of her as this beautiful mother, actually, because she had three colts.

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LA: I’d never thought of that.

IA: Now there are all these horses’s hooves in my work. You polish them, you wash them, and you carve them. They look like vulvas; they’re so erotic and so beautiful. I’m also creating flowers from scans of my body. I am growing them out of my studio floor, and I am making an erotic meadow that will grow through Nicodim Gallery in New York and possibly onto the street for my show in May. It’s called “Alien Spring.” Interestingly, when our house burned down [in the 2018 Woolsey fire] and we lost the objects made by all the women in my family, it was then that I started making physical work. Before that, I had tried everything not to be an artist, and I’d only done ephemeral work like performance. I had always seen myself as the archivist—that my job would be to hold all your sculptures and writings and I would run the estate. That was lifted from me with the fire. I saw how your paintings and grandma’s writing and great-grandma’s work held this feminine force, and I wanted to keep our story alive.

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LA: The feminine force.

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IA: It’s all of us, right? This larger “she.” In our family, we have such a support system between the living and dead around art.

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LA: What we create together as expressive entities is this extraordinary jeweled universe. The news and everything going on in the world is so crazy, and one of the hardest things artists have to do is say what is happening through emotion.

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IA: Any movement in art, any expression of interiority, takes a generation, takes multiple generations. It’s never just you or me; it is us. And part of the work of being an artist is supporting the collective “us.”