On second chances – Emily LaBarge in LRB:

“Little Louise, sometimes known as Louison, was brought into the family business aged eight as dessinateur, at that time an exclusively male role. On Thursdays and Sundays, when she wasn’t at school, her job was to draw in the missing sections – often bodies or parts of them. She started with the feet. At fifteen, Bourgeois left school altogether to work in the weaving and restoring ateliers full time, while preparing for the École des Beaux-Arts. The house was filled with stacks of tapestries and as a child she would fold herself inside them to keep warm or to hide – they were ‘a form of textile sculpture to be entered’, she said, a rich, immersive material.”

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“‘You can retell your life and remember your life by the shape, the weight, the colour, the smell of the clothes in your closet,’ she said. ‘Fashion is like the weather, the ocean – it changes all the time.’ Bourgeois had all the clothes, fabrics and textiles from her closets brought down to the basement studio and hung over the pipes according to colour. Those that evoked particular places, people or memories remained whole, while others were cut up and repurposed, stitched together, often crudely, to form heads and other corporeal elements. In Untitled (1996), eight pieces of clothing are suspended at different heights from a central steel pole; they radiate round it like ghostly, drifting bodies. Two silk slips, one carefully edged in lace; four delicate chemise-like vests, some frilled or with a necktie, others fastened at the side with silk-covered buttons; a pale pink pussy bow shirt; and a shimmering, beaded black cocktail dress hang on cow bones whose rounded joints extend through the arms of the garments. The pink shirt and black dress are gently padded, to remind us that these garments once held bodies. The words ‘SEAMSTRESS’, ‘MISTRESS’, ‘DISTRESS’, ‘STRESS’ are welded to the base – evidence of her childhood and of its vexing memories (her father was a serial philanderer who carried on a long affair with her young governess, among other tyrannies).”

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“A series of eleven heads made between 1998 and 2009 demonstrates her virtuosity and her attention to the particular qualities of fabric. The materials include wool, felt, muslin, tapestry, cotton, terrycloth; the heads appear to grimace, open their mouths in anguish, stare or implore. Some have no face, while others have three. Two heads, covered in raised seams that look like scars, face each other and touch the tips of their extended pink tongues. This is the heroic classical bust made soft and slyly weird.
In other works, bodies are enclosed in structures (Bourgeois called them ‘cells’) made of glass, wood, steel mesh, repurposed windows and doors; or arranged in dioramas. Visitors may already be familiar with some of these – small, pink, seam-covered bodies, often female and in various hybrid states – a selection of which were recently displayed at Tate Modern in a room devoted to Bourgeois. I was most surprised by Couple III and Couple IV (both 1997), large vitrines, each containing two headless black fabric figures lying on top of one another, like giant poupées abandoned in an inert romance. (If only they could love each other, I thought, quickly ashamed at the idea of their animation.)”

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“Three of her special edition fabric books – The Woven Child (2003), Ode à l’oubli (2004) and Ode à la Bièvre (2007) – are displayed page by page alongside a series of works from the mid-2000s that continue her spiral and web motifs. In these pieces, all untitled, swathes of coloured and striped cloth have been cut into triangles and tightly stitched together to form circles and patterns, which radiate outwards from fixed points. Some have small fabric flowers at their central nodes. Others have been turned over, revealing the network of intricate seams on the reverse and drawing attention to her labour. ‘Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex?’ Bourgeois asked, with reference to these works: Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the centre is affirmation, the move outwards is a representation of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive energy, or life itself.
In two late works from 2009, Eternity and Eugénie Grandet, the spiral becomes a clock face. Next to each number in Eternity is a pair of torsos, male and female, painted by Bourgeois on a square of fabric and then sewn onto the main piece, a vast white sheet.”

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“Sewing, Bourgeois wrote, ‘is a plea in favour of a/second chance, it is a plea in favour of/X and against Y.’ If severing and cutting were connected with the father, sewing was associated with the mother.”

Read the review here.

Sewing as the act of giving things a second chance, a second life. I like that,

My mother was an amateur seamstress, she didn’t do it for a living, but she was obsessed with repairing things. Clothes, furniture, toys, everything needed to be repaired and everything could be repaired.

The seamstress as a person who is blowing new life into old creations.