The first body is small. Her hands outstretched and fingers curved towards the earth, they beckon me into The Wandering Womb—a two-person exhibition with artworks by Louise Bourgeois and Isabelle Albuquerque. The body, a cast inspired by Albuquerque’s own, stands on a rock that feels both celestial and metamorphic. While the left hand gestures a call of welcome, the right hand tenderly touches the breast. I’m immediately seduced. This bronze and silver figure, titled The Left Hand of Darkness (2024), has a mirrored shadow that stretches across the floor. As a darkened silhouette, the hand looks prepared to capture, a reminder that multiple narratives can share one form.
Across the room, Bourgeois’s Torso, Self-Portrait (1963–1964) hangs against the wall. I don’t recognize the body right away because it feels less anatomical than ecological. Where there are organs and ribs, I see vines, roots, and stems paused in the body’s attempt to reach upward. I’m struck by its ability to grow, and I wonder, what does it take for a woman’s body to bloom?
This question threads itself through the exhibition like an insistent pulse. It fantasizes women’s bodily autonomy in a time when the right to choose motherhood remains under siege. Here, the maternal is both exalted and interrogated, honored when chosen, ruptured when refused. The works invite speculation as liberation, centering desire not as excess but as knowledge. The stake is the woman herself; her body as archive, her gestures as testimony, her stories as heirloom and revolt.
There is a material vocabulary that manifests itself within the dialogue between the two artists. In Albuquerque’s Venus Rising (2024), a small wooden body is bound to the wall. One palm rests at the throat, the other nearly between the thighs. It is in the material of the walnut, and its grains, that cause multiplicity to occur in the body as memory and time. Though headless, I imagine Venus looking up while pleasure moves through her. A pleasure that may have been ancestrally passed on.
In the turquoise sculpture Fallen Limb (2023), Albuquerque’s bodily exploration continues. A severed wooden arm lies on a plinth, a branch sprouting from its pinky. Another word for limb is branch. And this branch, despite being cut from its origin, still has the capacity to grow. It insists on reaching.
As if to challenge this amputated connection, beside it, Albuquerque’s two stainless steel orchids, Mother and Child (2025), remain fused by their roots. Generational connection and distortion intertwine here. The roots are what keep the structure standing up. I wish they could stretch far enough to touch the severed limb.
Then we have Bourgeois emancipating the material of ambiguity. Pregnant Woman (2002) sits in conversation with the drawing titled Untitled (1995). Both hover between conception and defiance. The small fabric sculpture is about a mother and a child, unless she doesn’t want it to be. It’s also about possibility. And the drawing, something like a uterus, but not quite, seems to be saying whatever it has going on is none of my business.
I don’t pretend not to be attracted to the eroticism in the artworks. Sometimes, reckoning with the body requires the experience of pleasure—assertive sexual exploration through an eerie imagination. In Orgy For Ten People In One Body: Two (2020), a body reclines on a white mattress, legs raised, a lit candle held between them. The wax of the candle slowly drips and gathers on the floor. To “wax” is to grow fuller. She gives us permission to look.
In Orgy For Ten People In One Body: One (2019), this same act of consent—enthusiastic and fantastical—is continued, but the woman’s body births or consumes a saxophone. I think about the sound of flesh and the breathwork of pleasure. Is the hand clutching the breast for stimulation or comfort? Are the feet curling from climax or contraction? Regardless, anticipation holds the body and prepares it to conceive. I think I would like the music.
This exhibition opens up the world of The Wandering Womb, an ancient Greek theory that a moving uterus could stir a woman’s mind and unsettle her body. As I map the wombs’ imagined migrations across these works, I begin to see each body as an act of self-examination. They’re also searching for their centers—touching their skin to find a point of entrance, offering their bodies as symbols of worship, tracing generational anecdotes across roots and branches, peeling back skin to make the inside visible, and choosing themselves despite it all. Their bodies are invoking, inheriting, surviving, and, like most women’s, doing a lot of holding.
The Wandering Womb
Lumber room, Portland, OR
October 11, 2025 – January 31, 2026
This review was made possible thanks to the support of our Art Writing Champion lumber room. Learn more about Variable West Art Writing Champions here.