Maman Sculpture 2 Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Jan 1 1991

Location: 

Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan

Through the use of mythical and archetypal iconography, Bourgeois translated her encounters into a very individualized symbolic imagery, employing things such as swirls, arachnids, cages, surgical equipment, and sewed appendages to represent the feminine mind, beauty, and mental agony. The artist compared her artwork and its many exhibition settings to “cells” – or recollection capsules that both trapped a remembrance or sensation in time while also invoking the feelings that those memories elicited.

Bourgeois worked with themes of universal equilibrium through the employment of abstract form and a broad range of mediums, playfully contrasting objects traditionally deemed male or feminine. She would, for instance, construct delicate biomorphic shapes indicative of femininity using rough or harsh materials widely correlated with the masculine. Bourgeois created spiders in a range of mediums and sizes ranging from a four-inch broach to Maman.

External sources: 

https://artincontext.org/maman-sculpture/
Posted by Mingjie on Jan 24 2025

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Provides (a useful service)Provides a useful social service.
Shifts (culture)Shifts the cultural landscape in order to imagine and enable change.
Strengthens (community)Strengthens, builds and celebrates community through ritual and/or symbol.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
The life of Louise Bourgeois was a productive display of how art may be used to analyze one’s internal emotions and mental terrain. Working in a range of mediums such as painting, sketching, and sculptures, her work was primarily concerned with dissecting, investigating, and responding to painful experiences from her own upbringing, including her father’s adultery. Her art is both broad and very personal in its portrayal of the psyche, with frequent, clear references to terrible childhood recollections of an immoral father and a caring but passive mother. But who was Louise Bourgeois, and what drove her to make her art?