Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child is an exhibition of the artist’s work created in the last years of her life, but only artwork that she made with fabrics and textiles, which often, conversely, actually related right back to her childhood and early family life and career, writes Michael Holland.
Bourgeois saved dresses and underwear throughout her life and in the mid-1990s began using them in her art. She said they were as ‘significant as the pages of her diary in their ability to hold the memory of people, places and events’.
The ‘Pole’ pieces display the garments suspended from cattle bones on metal sculptures with the words: ‘Seamstress, Mistress, Distress, Stress’. The words reference her family history and its impact on her.
Though she was never connected to a specific art movement there are nods towards Abstract and Surrealism, and she was adored by the Feminist Art movement. In fact, 95% of the visitors when I attended were women, while about 99% of the artworks related to women.
The exhibition title comes from how fabric and domesticity and family is important to her work; she saw the needle as something that repaired damage in all its forms. The Good Mother is seen surrounded by the cotton reels she is attached to; with the exhibition spread over several rooms on different levels we find women giving birth, couples kissing, women hanging, suspended in stairwells and in the centre of huge spaces; women encased in cages and spider webs, in high heels, suppliant as well as powerful.
My favourite in this show was Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife). Again she used her own clothes arranged on mannequins in a round cage, with two large, white balls on the floor creating a phallic composition.
Bourgeois was creating art for most of her 98 years. It is not always comfortable viewing but it is always interesting, and there is no denying that it comes from a place within her that needs an outlet to be seen and heard.
Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child is on at The Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX until 15 May 2022. Times: 11am – 9pm Wednesday; 11am – 7pm Thursday – Saturday; 10am – 6pm Sunday. Admission: £15.
Booking: www.southbankcentre.co.uk