Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time
Until May 9; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Fiona Bradley – appointed director of the Fruitmarket Gallery last year – has kicked off her exhibition programme with an absolute cracker. The latest work of New York artist Louise Bourgeois – fresh from a show in Dublin – breathes new life into the gallery space.

Bourgeois, originally from France, is an internationally renowned artist whose career spans Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, and whose creative energies are still vigorous at the age of 92. As a child, Bourgeois contributed to the family business of tapestry restoration, but only in the last few years has she returned to the needle and thread as a way of expressing her own deeply rooted traumas.

The artist’s silently screaming fabric figures are caged, encased and hooked from the Fruitmarket’s ceiling, threads hanging from their seams. Children laugh and point at the soft pink dolls, but they’re too young to see, stitched into the frayed surfaces, a lifetime of internalised torture, pain and brutality.

Bourgeois’s way into this new work came in 1996, with an untitled steel pole. From it hang eight chunky animal bones, hangers for the delicate old underwear of the artist and her mother. This compelling sculpture reminds us of our own animal existence, and the flimsiness of its coverings. These coverings – skin and cloth – serve as protection and disguise, and in Bourgeois’s work, they are pierced and patched, severed and stitched.

The materials she subsequently used for human figures and heads – old towelling, tights and jersey cottons, mattress ticking and worn upholstery – have intimate memories of human habitation. Stitched together they are like the collective experiences and scars which make up every human being, and the messier the threads, the more powerful the sense of pain.

These are voodoo dolls which don’t need pierced – they are tortured enough already. Most of Bourgeois’s figures are female, in female predicaments. Cell XVI (Portrait) is a refined, patchworked woman’s head rising out of a mesh-covered tureen. She sits, dignified and upright, in a metal prison made from objects Bourgeois found in skips. She is like the main course at a dinner party, her stuffing in danger of spilling out and her suffering contained by a polite show of manners.

Like most of the other heads in the show, she has an open mouth but no ears, unable to converse with the outside world. This isolation is a theme which runs through Bourgeois’s work, starting with her first suite of prints (dated 1947 – the only old work in the show), which tells nine short stories of loss and failed communication. Bourgeois was later to admit that she felt lost without her Parisian family and friends when she moved to New York in 1938.

Arched Figure is possibly the most disturbing work in the show, based on the potent Surrealist symbol of the arch of hysteria, another recurrent motif in the artist’s oeuvre. The screaming pink woman dangles armless inside her case, her body stretched out in agony or ecstasy. Her open-mouthed face hangs upside down before a two-sided mirror. On the other side, if you dare to look, you can see yourself. This artist really can get under your skin.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 21.03.04