This installation was in summer 2001.
For decades, Bourgeois has used the spider to explore issues
related to memories of her mother, who died when the artist was
20.
"My mother was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable,
dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as a spider,"
she once wrote...
The largest piece, titled "Maman," [see Fig. 1] includes
an egg sack below its rounded belly. Constructed with steel mesh,
it contains white polished-marble eggs that have an alluring,
gemlike quality. These and other details give you the feeling
that motherhood and family relationships are potent issues for
Bourgeois.
Indeed, the artist's many accounts of her family history are
loaded with enough juicy details to fill a gripping novel. In
1998, she wrote in Interview magazine: "I was brought up
in a dysfunctional and promiscuous family setup where no one would
talk about sex. On the surface, sex simply did not exist. But
in fact, we thought of nothing else. My father slept around with
everyone, including Sadie, our English tutor, who lived in the
house."
Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 on Christmas Day. Her family
owned and operated a tapestry restoration business, which has
fed critics' frequent analogies between seamstresses weaving tapestries
in the artist's childhood and spiders weaving webs in her art.
(article by Dan Tranberg in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, cached
on Google)
