Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child Review
Where:
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre
When:
until 15 May 2022
I don’t think the Guardian review could have put it better when it stated this art exhibition as quite the oxymoron: ‘strange, horrific, eerie, beautiful’.
I’ve always been a fan of the Hayward Gallery for the outlandish art it hosts. My two most memorable experiences visiting were trying to stay upright whilst on the roof, my world being turned upside down via a VR headset, and being sent into a glass rectangle of smoke mostly concerned I’d unexpectedly meet a wall.
Image: Louise Borgeois, Hayward Gallery, OSamuels
Anyway, my point being that again on eccentricity front, the Hayward didn’t disappoint. This exhibition, I believe was broadly aimed at the unsettled human experience, framed in Louise’s case through trauma in her childhood – her father had an affair with her teenage tutor and her mother dying at the age of 21.
In many displays, this felt directly obvious, some reviews citing too obvious. From distorted woven bodies to pained looking faces – there was something distinctly uncomfortable about the human nature of consciousness on display.
Recent forays into meditation have had teachers revealing to me in a way that has previously not felt so apparent: we often live anxiously for the future in a slightly vexed state today. Depressing? A little, however isn’t a purpose of art to evoke a collective feeling that makes the experience of it more bearable?
And so intentionally or not, this appears to be what Louise has done. A metal spider is the main event that you see plastered all over all the exhibition marketing, apparently Louise feeling an affinity for the creatures because they are ‘repairers’: ‘If you bash into the web of one, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it’. It seems Louise has decided to leave her trauma at the door and build past it, her art forms providing the passage to do so.
Image: Louise Borgeois, Hayward Gallery, OSamuels
Image: Louise Borgeois, Hayward Gallery, OSamuels
After this, some woven tapestry structures provided some contextual normalcy. This must reflect Bourgeois’ preference for maths and geometry as a child that she valued for their stability: ‘I got piece of mind, only through the study of the rules that nobody could change1’. `She later dropped maths in favour of Art at the time of her mother’s death, perhaps to as a testament to her own career in tapestry.
These works show the last two decades of Louise’s career where she stared to incorporate clothes from all stages of her life into her art, the most memorable in this case being some garments hanging off cow bones. Clothes also link to the theme of repair - she had a fascination with the needle: ‘it is used to repair damage. It is a claim to forgiveness.’ Perhaps again a nod to childhood roots including to her parents work as tapestry restorers.
Louise Bourgeois’ art overtime has been described as demonstrating how she was able to move from ‘the fear of falling, to the art of falling, to the art of hanging in there2’. Having visited this exhibition, I am so glad to she found such a wonderful outlet to be able to do so.
Location:
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd,SE1 8XX
Nearest station:
Waterloo Station
Price:
£15, free for members
Words by Olivia Samuels
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