Bourgeois remarkable invasion of Spiders and Towers to herald the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 completely smashed our sensibilities about space and emotion. Bourgeois envisaged the towers, with their multiple platforms and winding stairs, as stages for intimate and revelatory encounters between strangers and friends alike.
The “Cells” series, featured in this book and assembled between 1986 to 1998, dwell on her core themes of femininity, sexuality and isolation, and are viscerally explored in these astonishingly disturbing installations. Inspired by her own memories and experiences the work is often confronting and to our mind conveys immense emotional power and presence.
In creating space for others, albeit more calmly rendered, we too aim for both a physical and sensorial interaction with material, colour, texture, the ‘Readymade’, memory, and place.
“Each Cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at. The Cells either attract or repulse each other. There is this urge to integrate, merge, or disintegrate.” Louise Bourgeois 1991
Louise Bourgeois, The Secret of the Cells – ISBN 978-3-7913-4007-4
