Exhibition texts

Bourgeois saved clothing throughout her life, including dresses and undergarments from her childhood and items that had belonged to her mother. In the mid-1990s, she began incorporating this material into artworks. In a series of “pole pieces”, she displayed garments that were especially evocative of her past – ones she would not have cut or reconfigured. For Bourgeois, these clothes were as significant as the pages of her diary in their ability to hold the memory of people, places and events as well as the touch of her own body.

Suspended from cattle bones, the delicate slips and nightclothes in this work appear to float like ghosts. The black sequined dress and the beige silk blouse are loosely stuffed, giving them sculptural volume, whilst the bone hanger protrudes from the neck of the latter like a gruesome head. Welded into the base of the sculpture are the words “Seamstress, Mistress, Distress, Stress”; a play on words that references Bourgeois’s family history and its psychological impact on her.

One from a series of fabric couple sculptures made in the late 1990s, this pair of headless, copulating figures is encased in an antique vitrine, like a carefully preserved specimen. The work’s claustrophobic, almost coffin-like sense of containment suggests the suffocating character of relationships driven by a fear of separation or abandonment. For Bourgeois, the female figure’s wooden leg symbolises psychic injury or a loss of equilibrium. Bourgeois was fascinated by prosthetic limbs, which she first encountered during her childhood in France in the aftermath of the First World War, and in her late sculptures she increasingly included references to prostheses, crutches and amputees. Bourgeois saw the prosthesis as something which, like art, allows one to survive intense emotional suffering. Bourgeois noted that this sculpture alluded to the “primal scene”, a psychoanalytic concept describing a child’s real or imagined vision of a sexual encounter between its parents, which is perceived as an act of violence. This blending of sexuality and death, pain and pleasure, passive and active, gives the work an additional disturbing dynamic.

Within this circular enclosure, its contents visible from all sides, Bourgeois arranged three of her own garments on dressmaker’s mannequins: a striking blue cocktail dress; a patterned white day dress; and a short blouse encircled by a floating ring of blue, bell-shaped pieces of glass. Two large, white marble spheres are positioned on the floor. In another context they might conjure breasts but here, visually aligning with the light-coloured dress, they create a phallic composition at the centre of the Cell. This work reflects Bourgeois’s interest in the distorting effect of jealousy on one’s relationship to others.

In 1998 Bourgeois began making a series of stuffed fabric heads, using various textiles including cloth, towels, cotton ticking, patterned garments, needlepoint and tapestry.
Rather than making conventional likenesses of individual people, Bourgeois was interested in portraying a range of emotional and psychological states. Some of these heads feature more than one face, evoking the coexistence of contradictory or ambivalent feelings and attitudes.

Pierre was the first of Bourgeois’s series of fabric heads, and is titled after the artist’s late brother, who was institutionalised in 1945 and remained in an asylum for the rest of his life. Bourgeois felt increasingly isolated from him and guilty for her absence. A telling feature of this head is its missing ear, which symbolises their lack of communication.

Composed of several pieces of the same pink fabric, as if to suggest a fragmented self, Pierre is held together by notably loose stitching. This style of sewing conveys a palpable sense of psychic tension and is employed in many of Bourgeois’s early fabric figures. It could be read as the physical representation of psychological repair, much as scars are the residue of healing.

This group of works on paper presents some of the key motifs and processes in Bourgeois’s fabric work: cutting, mending, sewing and the needle. Spit or Star and Mending (1989) are the earliest works in the exhibition and seemingly anticipated the artist’s turn to working with fabric in the 1990s. Spit or Star depicts two pairs of scissors floating above a landscape. Bourgeois made several drawings of cutting implements around this time. Her interest in scissors and shears relates to their ambiguity as both instruments of creativity and violence; to the topiary boxwood trees of her youth, pruned to grow stronger; and to the cutting of the umbilical cord, which symbolises the interdependent relationship of mother and child.

Bourgeois created her “portrait cells” with the intention of representing particular psychological states. Smaller in scale and focussed on a specific dynamic or situation, they are a distinct subgroup of her larger and more complex Cell installations.

This is one of Bourgeois’s most ambiguous portrait cells. Made from old towels and dressing gowns, this enigmatic work fuses figurative and abstract, male and female, within a single sculptural form. One side resembles a torso with breast-like appendages, while the other features a protruding pink tongue. This duality imbues the work with an unsettling indeterminacy and precariousness.

In Cell XXIV (Portrait), three conjoined heads, each with two faces, hang together as a single sculptural form. The composition is roughly stitched together from pieces of black fabric, a colour that Bourgeois associated with depression, mourning and melancholia. Mirrors positioned in the corners of the Cell further multiply the six faces, providing various perspectives and serving to accentuate a sense of scrutiny, fragmentation and unease.

This work was inspired by Bourgeois’s attempts at understanding the origins of reticence and withdrawal in her youngest son, Alain, whom she always referred to as the “reticent child”. The small figurative sculptures in this melancholy diorama were intended to represent his birth and early life. The figures appear contorted and animated by a concave mirror, which adds to the work’s sense of narrative and theatricality, while also highlighting the distorting effects of memory. In a text accompanying the work when it was first exhibited at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, in 2003, Bourgeois wrote: “There is a child who simply refused to be born. His birth was quite late. Was there something that he perceived that prevented him from wanting to leave the womb and go out into the world? How much of who he will be, his feelings and actions, will be pre-determined by this refusal to appear? How will this child face the future? Will he be shy, reduced to silence, awkward or even hostile? He is the reticent child…”

In this series of fabric collages, Bourgeois cut up, repositioned and sewed together pieces of striped and patterned clothing and domestic fabrics in intersecting, sometimes concentric circles. These kaleidoscopic compositions resemble spiders’ webs, an image that represented “a friendly refuge” for Bourgeois and was a visual metaphor for her own creative process. The five nodes seen in many of the works – some with flowers at their centres – represent both the family Bourgeois grew up with, and the one she had with her husband. Though the fabric collages retain a strong visual formalism, their construction from domestic materials, and thus their associations with memory and the body, betrays deep emotional resonance.

Composed entirely of black cloth, this life-sized figure is consumed by its spiral form, which begins at the torso and encompasses its entire upper body and head. In Bourgeois’s iconography, the twisted body evokes nausea, dizziness and disorientation – physical manifestations of psychological states such as fear, anxiety, homesickness and alienation. Like a similar bronze sculpture that Bourgeois made in 1984, this fabric Spiral Woman hangs from a single point. The rotational movement implied by the spiral is emphasised by the sculpture’s potential to twist and turn in real space.

Bourgeois was interested in the spiral because it has two directions; as she said: “Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance [...] The move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself.”

Created in the months before her death, Untitled (2010) incorporates a collection of the artist’s own berets, stuffed and arranged atop a large armless torso lying on a steel platform. The berets recall both breasts and a hilly landscape, and yet they also seem abstract and enigmatic in form. The sharp contrast of the soft fabric against the steel surface on which they rest reflects Bourgeois’s interest in reconciling apparent opposites: hard and soft, geometric and organic, trauma and reparation, figuration and abstraction.