The Louise Bourgeois exhibition in Edinburgh “A Woman Without Secrets” was wonderful. However, I would say she was a woman WITH secrets. I mean we know only what she chose to work on – her marriage and her children were mostly unmentioned. She guarded closely certain privacies and secrets.
The exhibition was beautifully presented in a series of rooms at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. Only a few items are in each room so the space and light around them works well. In one room there were three suspended pieces : Fillette, Janus and Spiral woman.
The lighting cast interesting shadows which also filled the space. Fillette had two shadows. In real life I was surprised how small it/she was. Perhaps because in the Iconic Maplethorpe Photograph where Bourgeois carries it under her arm, in proportion to her it does appear large. But of course, she herself was very petite. Janus Fleuri was suspended at eye level and the contrast between the rounded (male) parts and fleshy vulval parts was striking – more so because it is in bronze yet the “softer” parts are convincingly soft and fleshy. I loved Spiral Woman and wanted to touch her , but only managed a surreptitious photograph instead. Again this piece is small – how wonderful if it were as big as Maman, but then again, the point would be lost. Spiral Woman IS small, her vortex is small like her and personal, not universal and not permanent.
In one of the rooms was one of the Spider – Maman series. Immediately on entering the room I saw a relationship with the metal of the spider inside and the scaffolding outside the window. It was uncanny.
in the same way with Poids, my eyes were drawn to the glass droplets which seemed so delicate, against the spikey twig like pieces of metal. Outside the raindrops hung on the trees’ branches in a similar fashion.
Bourgeois’s sculptures have a wonderful organic, tactile quality. They resonnate with their surroundings; they are of their surroundings.
Poids had an exqisite delicacy, and an exquisitely subtle balance to it. Remove any small component and the structure falls over. The Balance of Life – the interdependency of the heavy and the light. The completeness of all the components.
In one of the last rooms was Bourgeois’s final work – A l’Infini – towards the infinite , towards the end and the begining… This piece consisted of 16 drawings/etchings on A0 paper spanning the room. The themes of her life are there – birth, love, abandonment, the rivers, the arterial flow of blood in the veins, the beginnings and the ends.
She made these in 2008-2009 (she died in 2010), knowing her end was near, and in the last drawing the roads/arteries are white = empty, ready to begin again in the endless flow and beat of life.
I felt enormously moved and inspired.
