Louise Bourgeois is an artist who created sculptures dating back to the 1940’s and these sculptures covered a variety of topics that are related back to Bourgeois’ troubled childhood. The most iconic of these is her collection of spider sculptures which is what will be discussed in this article. I delved into these artifacts because I was fascinated about the depth of meaning placed into these sculptures.
In the following decades, Bourgeois’s work expanded dramatically in scale.
After her first New York solo show, Bourgeois continued pushing her art in new directions. In the 1950s, spirals began appearing frequently in her sculptures. She once described the twisting form, which would become a central motif in many of her later sculptures, prints, and paintings, as a representation of “control and freedom” for her. The artist began using materials like bronze, plaster, and marble in the 1960s to make sculptures based on human anatomy, from limbs and breasts to genitalia.These works wound up establishing the sense of disquiet and uncanniness that would be felt in much of Bourgeois’s art thereafter. With the series “Cells,” which Bourgeois began creating in 1989, several years after her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the artist addressed the notion of entrapment. She formed impenetrable barriers with her caged environments containing sculptures and sundry items like furniture, tapestries, and clothing. These psychologically fraught sculptures are meant to envision states of isolation.
Bourgeois began creating her iconic spider sculptures toward the end of her career.
Bourgeois started crafting her famed steel spider sculptures in the 1990s. The artist had previously experimented with arachnid forms in two ink and charcoal drawings made in 1947, but her sculptural series would take those ideas to a monumental scale. Perhaps influenced in part by her early years at the tapestry restoration business, Bourgeois once explained that she chose the spider as a subject because its traits reminded her of her mother. “She was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider,” the artist said” (Selvin, 2020).In Bourgeois time sculpting these spiders she covered a wide variety of topics, many of which pertained to entrapment or isolation. The steel frameworks and uncanny proportions add to this uncomfortable feeling one may receive while looking at and being present around these sculptures. Although the general feeling one may get from an outside prospective looking at these spiders may be uncomfortibility, the artist, Bourgeois, found the spider to represent something else entirely. These spiders represented her mother who was, “deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensible, neat, and as useful as a spider” (Selvin, 2020). How can design alter these prospectives of uncomfortibility and entrapment into a soothing, reasonable and patient perspective?
Source
Selvin, C. (2020a, May 20). Louise Bourgeois’s iconic spider sculptures have a surprising history. ARTnews.com. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/louise-bourgeois-spider-sculptures-history-1202687603/
