“Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child” at the Hayward Gallery, London

Spanning the entirety of the Hayward Gallery in London, Bourgeois’ sculptures, mobiles and her “Cell” installations overwhelm our field of vision. Fabric figures alternate between being overwhelmingly all-encompassing and miniature. The exhibition highlights the sculptural pieces she made with fabric and textiles in the final quarter of her career. As you traverse through the exhibition, the personal significance of these fabrics for Bourgeois is obvious. Her family came from Aubusson, renowned for its tapestry industry, and her parents owned a Paris gallery, where her father sold antique tapestries while her mother led a tapestry restoration workshop in Choisy-le-Roi. The troubled relationship that Bourgeois had with her parents and upbringing imbues the works in the exhibition and develops into her own experiences as a mother in The Reticent Child (2003).

The first encounter with Bourgeois’ work in the exhibition are her ‘pole pieces’, the most powerful of which is Untitled (1996). Her mother’s lingerie and dress hang on cattle bones, as if shoulders, and her childhood garments float in the still air of the gallery. Bourgeois believed that clothing had the same capacity as the pages of a diary to hold memories. The haunting paradox of the black sequined dress on the bone translates to us the traumas and discomfort she held towards her own childhood and family relationships. The tension between the creative violence of her cutting fabric and the reparatory bobbins that re-emerge throughout the exhibition involves the visitor in a fraught atmosphere.
 

The disconnect between the fragility and hardness of fabric is captured in the many “Cells” dotted around the exhibition spaces. Bourgeois began making chamber-like installations or ‘cells’ in 1991, in which she arranged personal articles and sculptural elements into highly charged compositions. These memory capsules range in scale from the intimate wooden concertina doors in Cell VII (1998), which encircle her garments, one of her eponymous bronze spiders in miniature and model of her childhood home, to the Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife) (2001), in which three headless mannequins wearing Bourgeois’ own dresses hang in a steel meshed cage. The headless women signify envy and she contrasts delicate blue glass teardrops with two white large marble spheres on the ground to reflect her interest in the mind-altering effects of jealousy in personal relationships.

The standout of these cells is on the second floor: Spider (1997) the tiny spider of the 1998 cell has become giant and it sits astride a steel mesh enclosure. This memory cage is ominous in scale and the spider is both familiar and predatory. She associated the spider with her mother, the tapestry restorer, and the curative restoration of the cage with tapestry fragments strongly call out to her memory. Bourgeois wrote, “I come 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.”
 

This overwhelming installation is emblematic of the show’s ability to convey the feelings of trauma and memory that Bourgeois explored in her fabric pieces. The violence of Bourgeois’ particular experience also touches the general of our own collective experiences alternating between childhood and motherhood as we pass through our life cycles. The curators invite the audience to experience her shapeshifting through her oeuvre sometimes with violence, sometimes with familiarity. Her fabric shapes twisting and turning in our imaginations.