Indelible imprint

I consider Louise Bourgeois to be a luminary in the art world. The breadth and longevity of her career, particularly as a female artist, is virtually unsurpassed. I consider her to be important beyond measure.

I first encountered Bourgeois’s work when I was in my early 20s. I was living in Palo Alto at the time, working on a large series of drawings. I saw a catalogue of her work in a sales pile at a local bookshop. It was in French – which I don’t speak – and it was a catalogue of her very raw, red line drawings on paper. It hit me like a cannonball. I had personally never encountered work that felt so quintessentially female, that spoke so directly to the experience of inhabiting a female form. The honesty, rawness, immediacy and emotional intensity of the line work – it completely blew my mind. It blew open so many new spaces for me to think about drawing as being primary to my practice and to think about the shared sensibility of making work so informed by the female experience.

Although nearly everything that Bourgeois has made stirs me deeply and stimulates my creative heart and soul, for me, I think it is her works on paper and soft sculptures that have an alchemy about them that has moved and informed my practice in very implicit and explicit, direct and indirect ways. She will remain the absolute queen and goddess of my art church – art is my religion and Louise Bourgeois is my high priestess!

During Louise Bourgeois’s long life, she made powerful statements through meaningful and provocative artworks that reflected the dualities of her interior life. She paved the way for my own artistic freedom, for reflection and for other female artists to have long and recognised careers.

Bourgeois’s soft sculptural works, the wide range of materials, combined with their scale, in particular the spiders, have broadly had an impact on my practice. I share a family background in textiles with Bourgeois and a connection to this family history has influenced my practice. Bourgeois’s cheekiness and the dualities of her art are captured in Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of her, taken in 1982, wearing a black fur jacket and holding her latex phallic sculpture, titled Fillette 1968. This image influenced my work Iconic Moment: Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse 2003. It is part of a series of portraits made from black, white and grey fused glass, inspired by images of women from the media and art history. This work is a type of remembrance and it was included in the Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2012, curated by Linda Michael.

I first encountered Bourgeois’s work at the Venice Biennale in the American Pavilion in 1993. Bourgeois represented the human body through abstract sculptural forms that made me think about the gravity and grace of her work. It seemed solid and grounded, yet poetic and personal at the same time. Her work engages with universal themes including childhood, memory, intimacy, sexuality, trauma, motherhood, the body and the home.

I am drawn to several facets of her work – the bold sexuality of the female-inspired landscape forms in Avenza 1968–69 and the intimacy generated by the sewn fabric bodies of Seven in Bed 2001. In 1994 I participated in an exhibition of female sculptor’s drawings at Frith Street Gallery in London, where I first saw one of Bourgeois’s Femme Maison images. I also saw a large spider at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC in 2009. While recently reading the children’s book Little people big dreams on Bourgeois to my daughter, I was taken by the dualities explored in her practice and by the simplification of the extreme giant image of the spider that was equated with the remembrance of her loving mother. Bourgeois’s work always makes me want to know more about her ideas and when I know more, I am both shocked and touched by them at the same time.

I first became aware of the work of Louise Bourgeois after leaving the Australian Ballet in the late 1960s to concentrate on my art practice.

I was excited by several aspects of her work – certainly her use of the body to convey emotion – to imply complex narratives through the rehabilitation of found objects and, importantly, the way that she could invest relatively simple materials with implications well beyond their familiarity.

Also revelatory, was the manner in which she encouraged a sense of theatre into her work and its presentation. It never lost the sense of intimacy and personal history that is so vital to her work, and I hoped this would become an important aspect of what I would do.

The spider works, with their highly personal subject matter and dramatic control of space, have been especially influential on my works such as A Wake 2011 (a celebration of the imagined life of a lost child), A Journey 2011 (her travels through the underworld) and Destination 2013 (her arrival).

Bourgeois’s Cell works also speak to me again through their use of space. It is a personal reading certainly, but one could imagine the behaviour of her objects in the defined and restrictive space of the cell, as not completely unlike a dancer’s existence within the boundaries and control of the stage.

I have long been interested in using found objects with their memories and imprints of previous lives, as in A Wake. Using materials that speak to other histories is obvious in Bourgeois’s work, and the layers and histories these invoke are also important to me.

The sense of drama I find in her work is compelling. Sir Robert Helpmann was director of the ballet during my time and instilled in all his dancers a strong love for theatre. Personal history, the exploration of the vulnerability of the human condition, its highs and lows, love and loss ... just what it is to live in the world.

I am now most impressed by the fact that she continued to work well into advanced old age ... something that I would like to emulate!

To my mind her work has been highly influential in the placement of women artists at the forefront of art history.

The exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 25 November 2023 to 28 April 2024.

A version of this article first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine