Simone Rocha on Louise Bourgeois

Fashion designer Simone Rocha reflects on the work of Louise Bourgeois on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz, ‘Louise Bourgeois. Papillons Noirs’.
Rocha first encountered the work of Louise Bourgeois at the age of 16 in the exhibition ‘Stitches in Time’ at IMMA Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Co-curated by Frances Morris, Tate Modern and Brenda McParland, IMMA, this exhibition examined the role of autobiography and identity in Bourgeois’s work, and her family connections to furniture and tapestry making. Her mother and maternal grandparents originated from the French town of Aubusson, famed for its textile industry, and her mother ran a tapestry restoration workshop. Bourgeois came to associate sewing with the act of reparation: ‘I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness’.
‘Papillons Noirs’ includes a series of black fabric heads from the last decade of Bourgeois’s life when the artist was in her late eighties and early nineties. In these works, Bourgeois layered hand-sewn scraps of black terry cloth, tapestry, and fragments of her own clothing to form the features of her fabric heads. Employing familial techniques from her childhood, Bourgeois confronted her past literally and metaphorically, stitching together scraps of old fabric to gain a semblance of understanding and reconciliation. For her, art was inextricably entwined with personal experience - it was a channel through which she explored the depths of her emotions. In her art-making, Bourgeois fused the intensity of the moment with memories of events and people from her past.