Louise Bourgeois

Influence of Louise Bourgeois...

Louise Bourgeois sculpture and installation work comments on human emotions and mental states. Focusing on themes of loneliness, jealousy, anger and fear- her work represents the affects of the mind. 

During the  1950s and early 1960s, there are gaps in her production of artwork as she became immersed in psychoanalysis. Due to life experiences her artwork allows a view into her unconcious mind, as if her artwork is also a type of psychoanalysis. I find this inspiring as she draws out her fears and traumas and personifies them, allowing a visual representation of the mind.  

For Bourgeois making art is a way of fighting specific fears (Bernadac and Obrist, p.267), one of which is the ‘trauma of abandonment’ that she suffered not only through her untimely birth on Christmas Day (Bernadac and Obrist, p.246) but also on her mother’s death in 1932, when Louise was only twenty-one (Bernadac and Obrist, p.207). Having experienced motherhood herself, she has dealt with the ambivalent feelings a mother may have for her children, as contradictory as those a child may feel for his or her mother. Just as the 1971 sculpture Le Trani Episode represents ‘a double attitude to be like a mother, and to be liked by a mother’ (Bourgeois quoted in Morris, p.288; sculpture reproduced p.289), Maman may be read as referring to more than one possible maternal figure: the artist, her mother, a mythological or archetypal mother and a symbol of motherhood. In a diary entry in March 1975, Bourgeois wrote: ‘You need a mother. I understand but I refuse to be your mother because I need a mother myself.’ (Quoted in Bernadac and Obrist, p.72.) Encountering Maman always from the perspective of the child looking up from below, the viewer may experience the sculpture as an expression of anxiety about a mother who is universal – powerful and terrifying, beautiful and, without eyes to look or a head to think, curiously indifferent.- Tate (2009) 

I personally  engage with her caged installation works as metaphors for the mind. This one in particular. The spider rules over the cage, confining it which acts to signify that most humans are ruled and refined by our fears. Fear limits us, and when fear becomes uncontrollable and manifests as anxiety disorders, it becomes overwhelming and traps the mind. 

Within the cage I view her use of objects as representative of the memory core of the brain in which sentiment is stored and creates emotion associations to certain objects such as childhood toys. 

The shadows cast by the structures cast patterns which I related to brain scan patterns and therefore as projections of the brain. 

I admire the scale and thoughtful combination of materials that Bourgeois applies to all of her sculpture and installation work and aim to use this to inform further progression with my sculptures.