It’s like a nightmare in M&S, this show of late fabric works by the great Louise Bourgeois. Nightdresses hang from animal bones, a doll is pinned to a chair with spider legs, mannequins in neat dresses are locked in rusty cages, others are giving birth or shagging each other, there are needles and silks and cottons spilling out everywhere. It’s like Hellraiser’s haberdashery.
Bourgeois was in her eighties when she really took to fabric, re-using the clothes and material she had lying around her to continue her lifelong explorations of trauma, sexuality and personal history. Her parents were tapestry repairers, and like them she uses a needle not as an instrument of violence, but of reparation for when everything is fraying. As much as the works here are surreal, visceral and violent, for Bourgeois this is art about fixing and healing. But it still doesn’t make for easy viewing.
The show opens with dresses and nighties hung off thick animal bones. They belonged to the artist and her mother, and they hover like ghosts, emotional corpses left to rot and hang. The same goes for the dresses locked in a cage like wild animals from a personal past. All of this is Bourgeois’s history haunting her.
It’s like Hellraiser’s haberdashery
Other things are less intact. Bourgeois tears fabric apart and reshapes it into heads and bodies. Tights are stretched around springs to form a coiled female torso, pink towelling becomes a part-knife-part-human body, or a small figure with three heads, a tapestry becomes a head with three faces. These are portraits of psychological states, of living with conflicting emotions, of physically carrying the weight of your feelings.
Two huge display cases show black fabric couples locked together, the female figures each have prosthetic limbs. They are wounded, traumatised figures.
Upstairs, a huge spider looms over a cage, fabric heads hang inverted in display cases. There are fabric totems – hard, solid things made of soft squishy stuff – wedged into glass boxes like specimens in a medical museum.
All the faces in this show scream in agony, the bodies twist in pain, bearing the marks of violence, age, birth. It’s incredibly harrowing.
This isn’t necessarily Louise Bourgeois at her best, and I'd say a lot of the 2D works on paper and fabric in particular are genuinely bad. But it’s also obvious that Bourgeois was creating this art to confront her feelings, using her needle to try to repair her trauma. In all the claustrophobic, overwhelming, emotional distress on display, you can see a truly great artist nearing the end of her life, and trying, desperately, to make peace.
