The Woven Child

This book provides a comprehensive overview of French-American Louise Bourgeois's works of fabric from the last two decades of the world-renowned artist's career. The works of fabric emerged when Bourgeois (1911-2010) began incorporating clothing scraps into her art and later expanded to include other textiles, such as bed linen, handkerchiefs, and tapestries and needlepoint. Louise Bourgeois is in the Louisiana collection and has exhibited at the museum several times – including her characteristic, psychologically powerful, spider sculptures.

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In the context of her works in clothing and fabric, Bourgeois has said: "I have always had a fascination with the sewing needle, the magical power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It is a demand for forgiveness."

Bourgeois's material works with the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and compensation, and functions as metaphors for emotional and psychological states.

Louise Bourgeois's work is full of autobiography, confrontations with her father, painful experiences from life as a child and as a woman. It revolves around confinement, surveillance and nightmares. Experiences that just won't let go and which are apparently close to the traumatic, like a psychotherapeutic dead end.

Dimensions: H: 28 x W: 24 cm, stapled
Pages: 192
Language: English
Author: Ralph Rugoff
Publisher: Hatje Cantz