Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois was an artist who worked in different media and frequently addressed
issues like trauma, sex, and memory. However, it is her sculptures of spiders that have come to
distinguish the late artist's career. Several tower 30 feet above the ground and menacingly loom
over visitors' heads. An overview of Bourgeois' sculpture technique and the reasoning behind her
later-in-life decision to focus on the spider is provided below.

Maman

In the 1990s,
Bourgeois began creating her iconic steel spider sculptures. In two ink and charcoal drawings,
she did in 1947, the artist had previously experimented with spider forms, but her sculptural
series would take those concepts to a massive scale. Bourgeois has said that she chose the spider
as a subject because its characteristics reminded her of her mother. This statement may have
been motivated by her early years working in the tapestry repair industry. She was "as handy as a
spider," the artist claimed, "deliberate, clever, calm, soothing, rational, elegant, subtle, necessary,
neat."

The enormous spider Maman (1999) throws a menacing physical and mental shadow,
like a dream creature or a larger-than-life representation of a hidden childhood phobia. The large
sculpture, which stands over 30 feet tall, is one of Louse Bourgeois' many ambitious projects.
More than any other artist of her era, Bourgeois explored the depths of human feeling over a
massive body of work spanning more than sixty years. Her art is deeply personal and universal in
its portrayal of the mind; it frequently refers to sad childhood memories of an unfaithful father
and a supportive but complicit mother. The largest of Bourgeois' spiders is Maman, which was
created for the opening of Tate Modern in London in 2000 and is still in the museum's collection.

Visitors can
walk around the
creature's
eight widely
spaced legs
and look up at its
elegantly
coiled body.
The large-scale
spider
carries a bag
of marble eggs under its body. At the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, one of the six bronze casts of
the original steel piece stands opulently in a plaza outside. The National Gallery of Canada in
Ottawa, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and other
international organizations also have editions of Maman in their collections.
 Thin, asymmetrical ribs that resemble the corrugated helix of Maman's upper body
support the wire mesh that allows the viewer to see inside the egg sac in her abdomen. The net is
disturbed by round, triangular, and diamond-shaped holes and small nipple lumps and bumps
emerge alone and in groups. The late 1960s have seen the appearance of these clustered
protrusions that resembled breasts in the designer's work.

"Maman" egg sac continues the tradition of a fully-walled

chamber enclosing a spider's body, which was first discovered in
1997. A distended foam form pinned with pins, pendants, and old
trophies, all connected to the interwoven walls, elicits a web full
of entombed prey species, beneath the spider's stomach full of
glass eggs dressed in nylon tights. The cell also contains remnants
of ancient tapestries, shaped bones, and old perfume bottles. The
objects have connections to the artist's past: when she was
younger, she helped her mother fix antique tapestries (the family
business); she also loves the perfume; and a broken pocket watch
that hangs from the cell wall used to belong to her grandpa.
 If you will look into the spider’s stomach, it looks like a head of a human
upside down. If I am going to interpret it, it is someone looking down
aggressively because of how it was positioned downwards. Maybe it’s a
representation of the abandonment that Bourgeois felt when her mother
died. Her emotions are reflected in her artworks including her sculpture.

The eight long legs of the spider can be interpreted as the eight stages of
man. Her experiences and trauma from her infant stage up until her
teenage years made her create a massive and meaningful series of sculptures. The people
surrounding her made a great impact on her life. Even when she was already in her early adult
stage, her mother left a void in her heart. She was greatly affected by the grief that she wants to
take her life.

On the other hand, it can also mean the eight stages of grief. When her mother died, she
tried to commit suicide because of the pain she felt. She experienced the stages of grief, fear,
anger, the denial. She suffered mental instability for a while. She accepted it by making an
artwork inspired by her mother. We can see that Bourgeois told her story through her works. We
can say that art is not just art, it can create space for our hearts.