Louise Bourgeois became engrained in public consciousness in May 2000 with her monumental spider sculpture made for opening of the Tate Modern. Maman dominated the turbine hall with its angular bronze legs and an egg sac filled with marble eggs looming over the viewers’ heads below. Nearby the words I Do, I Undo and I Redo on three steel towers emphasised the evocation of motherhood.
Spiders are a central motif in the work of Bourgeois, and you’ll find their threads running through the new retrospective, Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child at The Hayward Gallery. Seen as a metaphor for her own creative process, the spider constructs its web out of its own body. In Cell VII (1998), which opens the show, a small spider is enclosed in a claustrophobic room-like environment constructed from old doors, with clothes belonging to Bourgeois and her mother hanging from cattle bones. The thin white fabric has a haunting, ghostly quality evoking memory.
As a weaver and restorer of antique tapestries, Bourgeois’ mother is also represented by the spider. ‘I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.’ On the upper floor, Spider 1997 has a tapestry-covered chair at its centre just missing the mother to sit in it.
Themes of the female experience, the ties of family, sex and the passing of time are explored throughout. The emphasis is on the latter part of the artist’s career and her works made with fabrics and textiles many of which have never been shown before in the UK. There are stuffed fabric legs dangling from a thread, copulating bodies encased in antique vitrines, quilted tapestries and sculptures made with scraps of fabric and old bed linen. Tracey Emin comes to mind; that the pair became friends and collaborators is no surprise (do read this excellent article on their relationship).
Having died in 2010 aged 98, many of the pieces on display at The Hayward were made when the artist was in her 80’s and 90’s. Eugenie Grandet is a series of 16 small frames filled with very pretty sewn panels – silk flowers, embroidered pearls and buttons, a jewelled clock with cotton thread hands. Obsessed with the character of Eugenie from Balzac’s novel of the same name Bourgeois said, ‘I have a great longing for revenge against my father, who tried to make me into an Eugenie Grandet.’ It was made in 2009, when the artist was 97, and it is a mark of her spirit that she was railing against that to the very end. The spectacular show reveals her as an almighty and prolific artist – revenge indeed.
A Little Bird Loves
