The Woven Child, Hayward Gallery
The first impression stepping in was left by the soft colours. Pink satin, off white nightgowns, rough wood and old tapestry. Pink, blue, beige. Motherly, feminine, soft, welcoming, comforting. Reminds me Jan Svankmajer’s movie, Alice in Wonderland.
I feel a yearning. I wanna be hugged by it. And I think it makes me think of my mother. Of my grandmother. Of quiet evenings spent embroidering with my mom or helping my grandmother sew bedsheets and duvets. Quiet and safe.
I have always loved fabrics. Stop-motion animations are my favourite kind of movies. I always keep old clothes thinking I will one day use the fabric somehow. I guess I forgot why.
Time passes and in the gallery I start hearing the word ‘trauma’ being mentioned quite a bit. ‘How can you stay here among these atrocities?’ a visitor asks.
I knew nothing about the artist.
I knew nothing about the artist and yet I perfectly guessed the subject without any briefing. I think it is what people call visceral. Her feelings towards her mother, her father, her children, her sexuality and femininity, that I later learned she had were perfectly communicated through her work alone. I once heard that if you want to make work that reaches people, you must try to speak of things you know. Of things you personally felt and went through.
After a short research, I came upon some of her writings, my favourite one being ‘How much violence is there in you today?’. Saved in my notebook.
Looking for possible connections to music, I found out she had many. She favoured musical notation paper.
Printed music paper became a major element in Bourgeois’s work in the mid-1990s, with a series called The Insomnia Drawings. The horizontal staves provided a visual rhythm and also a foil against which to react. They form the backdrop for her Fugue portfolio of 2002–05, where squares, circles, lines, and spirals suggest reverberating sounds. Also during these late years, Bourgeois issued two CDs capturing her own brand of singing and inventive lyrics.