How this sculpture has played a role in my life.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been looking after my mother, who had a fall and is unwell. Anyone who has experienced this situation knows that it isn’t easy, yet a strange peace is found in an atmosphere of seemingly ethereal connections that suddenly become lifelines of meaning. For me, because I am not a religious person, those connections, those links, are found in words and art. 

The first time I encountered Maman, a large spider sculpture by Bourgeois, was in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. My son, Eddy, was a toddler, and we sat in this vast space eating apple slices. I carried him under Maman’s egg sack. I couldn’t understand why the sculpture impacted my nervous system and why I was so compelled to be inside those enormous legs. Now I know that it’s because the sculpture represents a loss of cultural and maternal protection for me. Louise Bourgeois made the sculpture as a type of memorial to her mother, who wove tapestries and died early and suddenly. The sculpture is a tribute to the parent she lost. This resonates with me on so many levels, and I realize that I respond to her work as a proxy for absent parents. It instructs me somehow. The guidance feels historical and familial. 

The function of the modern artist is to create a place for the viewer to attend to their individual, as well as cultural, repressions. Louise Bourgeois was one of the pioneering artists who constructed such a space. When I experience her artwork, I feel as though I am entering the recesses of her mind and transferring them into my own, where an electricity I had not known begins to culminate in the need to seize itself.  This tension means that something inside my unconsciousness needs examining. I aspire to create a comparable form of simmering for my readers. Art should move us beyond pleasure and contradict our certainties so that we instinctively consider the differences between our narratives of identity and our felt experiences of reality, the outside and the inside of existence.

LB was an architect of analysis. I remember visiting an exhibition of her Cell installations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The starkness of the gallery was a grey matter that I walked through, where cages and wooden boxes, lit as stage sets, as synapses, lay dropped inside this cavity as a scattering of memories. Each object existed inside a tremor of isolation, often magnified by mirrors, yet simultaneously woven together into a story that felt connected to the story of my own delusions, the subjects that remained unfilled.  She parted, for my attention, an opening towards a truth, which I cannot explain beyond that it had been missing, and I had not known to look for it, and so, occurred in me as a life I might have lived, or dreamed, a phantom limb life. 

The consequence of my devotion to LB has been that I have planned holidays around exhibitions and Maman’s locations. I’ve taken our children on pilgrimages to Spain, Portugal, and Germany to stand under Maman and marvel. 

I wanted to explain my relationship with LB before I relate this beautiful link – 

I recently wheeled my mother around Washington, D.C., because visiting during a democratic presidency is on her bucket list. It was during the heatwave, and wheelchair accessibility is frustratingly challenging in this ‘old’ city, not to mention my mother’s depleted energy and a thousand other things too grim to detail. Suffice to say, I was struggling. My only saving grace was that my daughter was with me and was/is a magnificent help. We stopped in a museum cafe and rallied ourselves with iced coffee. I walked to the counter to stock up on extra napkins. I used them to wrap around the handles of her wheelchair when I needed a better, less sweaty, slippery grip. That’s how hot it was, and I was exhausted. I looked up and out of the window across the sculpture park. What did I see? A smaller, though just as glorious, version of Maman in the grass. How had I not known she was here? 

It felt like something beyond my comprehension had been spoken, as if the world was listening and present. I took a deep breath and found the reserve not to break. That evening, by the light of a cracked curtain, so as not to wake my daughter, I wrote the following poem. I don’t know why there aren’t spiders in it, or even if it’s complete, but I suspect my guidance has to do less with webs and more with nets, boats, and the sea. I live beside the sea and try to make some kind of connection (swimming, walking beside, beachcombing) with the water every day. We all have natural phenomena that captivate us and offer healing. I hope you have discovered yours. xx

Be well, everyone x

Three Types of Tender

1.

Tender is the way you take

responsibility for what makes you

vulnerable, paid for with your lost life,

drenched to swollen and ill-fitting.

2.

How you board, each night, the same

small ship that takes you

to its larger vessel of hunger,

the journey, the desire, you believe,

will transport you into someone new,

but first, your selves, scathed off

into wet piles on the wooden deck.

First the sores, then the thoughts,

seeping.

3.

Tender is the meat

you can suffer to swallow,

the heart.