Maisons fragiles
One of the most joyful parts of working at a library is serendipity of coming across books that I may never have known about otherwise. Today it was Amy Novesky and Isabelle Arsenault’s Cloth Lullaby, a delicately-illustrated children’s book about Louise Bourgeois. The book is so lovingly crafted and poetically written that it feels like a piece of art in its own right. But it also, generously, introduced me to Bourgeois’ work.
Bourgeois lived for a century and her life spanned from the end of the Victorian era into the 21st century, which is captivating to me in and of itself. Her mother taught her the trade-craft of textile repair, which carried into her later works, alongside painting, printmaking, and sculpture.
One piece I’m drawn to is Spiral Woman (1984), a kind of post-script to her original Spiral Woman, created in the 1950s.
“In Spiral Woman, 1951–52, Bourgeois explores the abstract form and dynamism of the spiral by stacking blocks of wood on a steel rod. The spiral becomes rounded in Spiral Woman, 1984, implying flesh and folds, from which arms and legs protrude. Suspended by a cable from the ceiling, the sculpture resembles a corpse spinning on the axis of its demise.” [ICA Boston]
“The spiral in her work demonstrates the dangerous search for precarious equilibrium, accident-free permanent change, disarray, vertigo, whirlwind. There lies the simultaneously positive and negative, both future and past, breakup and return, hope and vanity, plan and memory.” [Wikipedia]
The title of this post is drawn from the name of a series of her sculptures, Maisons Fragiles.
“Bourgeois’ precariously balanced series of sculptures give the illusion of frailty, but on closer inspection a steel construction provides them with a hidden strength. Appearing like empty houses, the ‘Maisons Fragiles’ are a commentary on the solitude of domestic life, confronting the deeply repressed issues that conditioned her youth.” [Wallpaper]
I also love to explore the concept of home in my work. Mine tends less toward the solitude of domestic life (since I haven’t lived through that personally), but rather the breakdown of family and of the home itself.
