The myth of feminine hysteria didn’t start in a Victorian sanatorium. Long before Freud heard about it and thought it sounded super legit, ancient Greek doctors imagined the uterus as a restless “wandering womb,” traversing the body and wreaking emotional havoc. In The Wandering Womb at Lumber Room, Los Angeles-based artist Isabelle Albuquerque revives and digs into that old myth. Her drawings and figural sculptures share space with multimedia works by modern art matriarch Louise Bourgeois.
Chief curator Libby Werbel sets the show up as a sensory séance, with sculptures of shapeshifting bodies paired with gestural wall works and olfactory elements. Woman-owned perfumery OLO Fragrance designed distinct scents for both gallery levels– Unconscious on the ground floor, Conscious upstairs.
Upon entry, a damp, earthy note wraps around Albuquerque’s figure sculpture “The Left Hand of Darkness” and Bourgeois’ painted bronze ribcage “Torso, Self-Portrait.” On the second level, a resinous fragrance mingles with the beeswax candle burning between the legs of Albuquerque’s plaster figure “Orgy For Ten People In One Body: Two.”
Albuquerque’s materials—steel, glowy oil on aluminum, even real blood—pulse with sensual charge. A plaster foot curls in orgasm, a bronze groin fuses with a saxophone, and a disembodied arm, blued with cupric nitrate, sprouts flora. Patinated bronze wildflowers rise from beach wood and lava rock. In “Mother and Child,” from her Alien Spring series, a two-headed steel flower balances on root-legs. Using 3D scans and multimedium casts of her own body to create her figural works, Albuquerque reveals transformative states. These are bodies-in-process, wandering in form, melding with and extending Bourgeois’ vision.
Bourgeois’ reflections on ritual and the psyche ground the show. Her “Untitled” drawing, in ink and crayon on sheet music paper, reveals a curious pattern of layered orbs. Hovering above Albuquerque’s headless bronze figure, Bourgeois’ Tous le Cinque suite of 76 red bullseye drawings underscores her repetitive process and preoccupation with psychoanalysis. (Learn more on that in the 2008 documentary Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine, looping in the gallery’s screening room.)
The Wandering Womb reaches toward other femme artists, too. A takeaway broadside pairs a Hildegard von Bingen quote with a poem by Ariana Reines: “When I feel alone there are two/Women who stay by me. My mother/And my grandmother. Who are dead.” Writer-director Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours pulled inspiration from Albuquerque’s Orgy For Ten People series—you can see two pieces from it in this show.
Bourgeois’ artistic legacy navigates the tension between repression and release, while Albuquerque finds the cracks and lets hot wax seep through. Their pairing locates the body in its animalistic, inherited, and sense-driven multiplicities. The Wandering Womb doesn’t ask where the body wanders, but what wanders through it: trauma, pleasure, and something beyond words.
The Wandering Womb is installed at Lumber Room, 419 NW 9th, Fri-Sat 12-5 pm and by appointment through Sat Jan 31, 2026, lumberroom.com.
