"I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it.” –Louise Bourgeois
At first glance, Louise Bourgeois’ spiders might look sinister, or even threatening. I remember being terrified of them when I was little. However, these whimsical sculptures are actually touching meditations on motherhood and femininity.
To better understand her spiders, we must travel back in time to Bourgeois’ childhood, since her artistic practice was mainly driven by her troubled childhood memories. When she was young, Bourgeois discovered that her father was having an affair with her tutor, who lived in their family’s home. This deeply troubling —and ultimately defining— betrayal remained a vivid memory for Bourgeois for the rest of her life. As if that wasn’t enough, her mother passed away when Bourgeois was just 22 years old. This sudden loss, coupled with her father’s infidelity, led to an intense fear of abandonment and a deep appreciation of motherhood, both key themes in Bourgeois’s later work.
Over the course of her long career, Bourgeois made countless sculptures, prints, and works on paper, but her defining artistic moment came near the end of her life, when she embarked on the iconic Spider series. Bourgeois started this series in 1994 — when she was already 83 years-old and a mother of three. As she grew older Bourgeois became obsessed with the idea of motherhood, and her spiders were the manifestation of this obsession. Bourgeois used the spider, both a predator (a menacing threat) and protector (an industrious repairer), as a symbol of the mother figure. The spinning and weaving of the spider’s web references Bourgeois’s own mother, who worked in the tapestry restoration business. Hence, these works are, at their core, a tribute to Bourgeois’ mother — a tribute to all mothers.