Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, UK
9 February 2022 – 15 May 2022
If you’re looking for something to do over the Easter break and you happen to be in London, I highly recommend visiting the Louise Bourgeois exhibition currently on view at the Hayward Gallery. It’s a rare chance to step fully into Bourgeois’s personal universe, steeped in eerie darkness, intimacy, and extraordinary creativity.
I always enjoy entering an artist’s individual world—tracing their inspirations, their obsessions, their forms of expression. In this case, both the architecture of the Hayward and the thoughtful curatorial design worked together to immerse visitors deeply in Bourgeois’s inner landscape. It made the experience particularly compelling for me.
The Woven Child is the first retrospective dedicated to the fabric and textile works Bourgeois created during the last twenty years of her career, from the mid-1990s until her death in 2010. During this period she broke away from traditional sculptural materials and returned to her origins. Most of the pieces here are figurative sculptures made from household textiles—clothing, linens, fragments of tapestry—materials drawn directly from her family history and her own memories.
Bourgeois’s relationship with fabric began very early and formed a core part of her identity. As a child, she helped in her family’s tapestry-restoration workshop in France, while enduring a traumatic upbringing dominated by an oppressive father. The acts that structure these artworks—cutting, tearing, sewing, binding—evoke the notions of repair and the emotional labour of confronting trauma. The exhibition explores what Bourgeois called “the magical power of the needle… to repair the damage” and to offer “a claim for forgiveness.”
Among the most striking pieces is the selection of fabric heads, each with its own mysterious, unsettling expression. They appear alongside a host of bodies and limbs—intertwined, fragmented, suspended from the ceiling or enclosed in vitrines. Most of these works are installed on the lower floor, where the dim lighting heightens their drama and intimacy.
The exhibition also features several of Bourgeois’s monumental Cells, including the imposing installation Spider (1997), displayed upstairs, and the related Cell piece Lady in Waiting (2003). In these works she hung old dresses, slips and nightwear, and incorporated antique tapestry fragments, all watched over by an enormous steel spider.
For Bourgeois, the spider was both protector and predator, associated with her mother, who was a weaver and tapestry restorer. The spider’s ability to create a web from its own body became a powerful metaphor for the artist’s own generative process. As you peer into the Cells, you feel yourself inching closer to her intimacy and to the narrative she has so meticulously sewn around you.
Upstairs there is also a selection of fabric drawings, books, prints and collages, along with several of her non-figurative “progressions”: vertical stacks of textile lozenges arranged in ascending and descending order, a return to the tall sculptural forms she explored in the 1940s and 1950s. These pieces, evocative of her childhood, carry a lighter tone than the figurative works.
Walking through this exhibition feels like entering the artist’s mind and confronting her lifelong preoccupations: identity, sexuality, family, repair, the subconscious, and memory. Each theme is expressed with remarkable clarity through the use of fabric—a material deeply rooted in her personal history. I hope you enjoy the photos of our interactions with these works.
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