Louise Bourgeois, The Woven Child reviewed by Alice Burnhope...

Louise Bourgeois, The Woven Child reviewed by Alice Burnhope...

Words Augustine Hammond and Alice Burnhope

Against the brutalist and concrete backdrop of London’s Southbank, The Hayward Gallery, has opened the first retrospective of artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) to focus solely on her work with textiles. In the final two decades of her life, Bourgeois began incorporating soft materials – including the ‘second skin’ of her own clothes – and other domestic fabrics from all stages of her life into her work.

This final chapter in the development of her art resulted in a collection of sculptures, drawings and installations that reiterate the key themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, emotional repair and reparation, which are central to the artist’s work.

Louise Bourgeois ‘Spider, 1997’ | Photograph by Mark Blower courtesy of The Hayward Gallery

 

‘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

Hole & Corner spoke to fellow repairer and textile artist Alice Burnhope, whose work is on sale at The Hayward Gallery during the retrospective. One of Hole & Corner’s selected makers at the Cockpit Summer Festival in 2021, Burnhope’s work uses discarded fabrics and traditional craft to address the imbalance between material waste and the effect on the environment. Following the exhibition’s opening, Burnhope chose the following three favourite pieces on display and drew technical and emotional parallels to her own multidisciplinary work.

Louise Bourgeois ‘Endless Pursuit, 2000’ | Photograph by Alice Burnhope at The Hayward Gallery, London

Endless Pursuit, 2000

Fabric, Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland.

Endless Pursuit is a human-like sphere made from blue patchwork. I adore its imperfect stitch marks that hold an almost visible tension between the irregular patched fabrics. Within this piece, I admire the artist’s use of storytelling through the abstract shape, stitch techniques and use of a singular block colour of blue. You can almost feel Bourgeois’ frustration, weariness and desire to move forward, only to be pulled back by life’s confinements. Like Bourgeois, I use similar textile techniques of patchwork, piecing together preloved fabrics with sentimental value to create soft sculptural forms with narrative and history.

‘Small Bum Painting’ by Alice Burnhope (top) Louise Bourgeois ‘Femme Maison, 2001’ (bottom)  Photographs by Alice Burnhope

Femme Maison, 2001

Fabric and Steel, The Easton Foundation, New York.

Femme Maison depicts a soft abstracted female form, which offers the landscape for a cosy shelter positioned on the abdomen of the figure. This piece caught my attention and ignited my own interest in the abstraction and comfort of the human form; how the profile of our bodies look like the rolling hills and how the soft curves of our form mould together as we embrace to offer comfort and intimacy. These ideas are illustrated throughout my soft sculptures, as seen in the Bum series on sale at the Hayward Gallery.

Louise Bourgeois ‘The Cold of Anxiety, 2001’ at The Hayward Gallery | Photograph by Alice Burnhope (left) Photograph by Mark Blower courtesy of The Hayward Gallery (right)

The Cold of Anxiety, 2001

Fabric and Steel, Private Collection, New York.

Lastly, my favourite piece in The Woven Child exhibition has to be The Cold of Anxiety, 2001. This installation is a series of stacked fabric towers made from domestic clothing, bed linen, terry cloths, tapestry and upholstery. The repetitive forms offer order to the chaotic and ’emotional world’ Bourgeois inhabited. I felt a calmness when looking at the piece, whether it was the mutual understanding of suffering from chronic anxiety and OCD, or whether it was the understanding of the desperate need to create through emotion as a way of unburdening from fears and worries. Either way, this piece resonated with me on an emotional level to embrace my chaotic mind and communicate these anxieties through the manipulation of textiles. I also love Bourgeois’ resourcefulness of fabric choices, using fabrics that have sentimental attachment, or have been close to her skin, instead of buying new ones.

Alice Burnhope ‘Day & Night’ (left) Alice Burnhope ‘Relief’ (right) | Photographed by Luke Burnhope

 

aliceburnhope.com

@aliceburnhope

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