Louise Bourgeois on Fabric

Textiles have a special importance for Bourgeouis. Growing up, her parents were dealers and restorers of antique tapestries; lending the medium a filial significance. Just as her father’s infidelities and the resulting strain on her parents’ marriage would haunt her forever, constantly resurfacing in her emotionally-dense artworks, the textiles they worked with also never quite left her consciousness.

In this series, created during the last eight years of Bourgeois’s life, the artist utilises discarded towels, sheets, clothes and other fabrics from her personal collection to create both ‘drawings’ and ‘sculptures’ that explore themes of motherhood, sexuality, marriage, femininity and domesticity. The intimate nature of the fabrics she works with – all embedded with memories (she once declared “Clothing is…an exercise of memory”) – coupled with the parental association with textiles stretching back to early childhood, render this series of works an intensely personal experience, as well as a visual spectacle.

All images from Cheim and Read