INVERLEITH HOUSE, EDINBURGHLOUISE Bourgeois already has a long and distinguished career behind her, but even now, well into her tenth decade, her creativity has not slackened. The majority of the remarkable drawings currently on
exhibition at Inverleith House are new and are being shown for the first time. They are also all quite unlike anything she has done before. Maybe the garden context has stimulated her to think afresh about the life processes we share with other living things. Certainly her chosen title, Nature Study, seems to reflect her response to the fact that Inverleith House is at the heart of the Botanic Garden.
That is further emphasised by a parallel show of botanical drawings, part of the Garden's own collection and made as teaching aids for John Hutton Balfour, who was keeper of the gardens in the middle of the 19th century. Designed to be legible seen from a distance by his students, these are not typical botanical illustrations at all. They are big, bold and simplified. One drawing of a sundew, for instance, is on 12 sheets of paper and is almost on the scale of a mural. They may have been functional in origin, but they are visually dramatic.
They also make a nice counterpoint to Bourgeois's drawings. Amazingly she is only seven years Salvador Dalí's junior, so she really does belong to the Surrealist generation and shares with them a willingness to explore the whole range of human experience, conscious and unconscious, without allowing anything to inhibit her questing imagination or her choice of imagery.
Nevertheless, her perspective is very much her own. It is also manifestly a woman's, but she is not polemical about her gender. Rather she touches on universals from the perspective of the particulars of her own life, which happens to be the life of a woman. Nevertheless, her gaze is so unflinching, while our expectations are so conditioned, the result is frequently subversive.
She is best known for her sculpture and there are several here. The stitched figures that she makes from her old clothes, and which have a disturbing resemblance to witchcraft dollies, are represented by Arrival, for instance. It is a limbless female torso stitched out of pink cloth, with yellow fabric for the breasts and the nipples and lips picked out in red. The woman has a head at both ends, one between the shoulders where you would expect it and the other, identical, but smaller, projecting from her womb. Reduced to pure functionality by the absence of limbs, the figure represents the moment of birth, of arrival, but also, because of the apparent identity of the two heads, how at that moment, by a kind of metamorphosis, one person becomes two.
Another work, Topiary, carved in stone, is also a female figure, but her upper body has turned into a rigidly organised plant form, appropriate to a garden, perhaps, but also a wry comment on female fashion.
These may be what we think of as a typical Bourgeois images, but the drawings are very different. Done in blood-red gouache, shading at times to carmine, they are the heart of this show and are quite unparalleled even in her remarkable œuvre. In a series called The Feeding, for instance, she shows a child at the breast, its mouth wide and demanding. It is an image of hunger, but such a reductive image of the mother-child relationship also somehow suggests how the hunger for love is as basic a need as physical hunger, and that they are not easily distinguished.
In several of these drawings the wash is gathered in the contour of the breast as though actually liquid and contained by it. Beneath, but still with greedy mouth open, the baby has become a homunculus, a tiny, full-grown man, or perhaps it is a woman. Either way, later in life this same hunger for love becomes transmuted into the imperative of sex. Because of the red wash, too, what flows from the breast is not milk, but blood. In several drawings its red line is like an umbilical cord. Childbirth, breastfeeding and sex are all rolled into a single image; the economy of execution matches the compression of the thought.
Bourgeois's sculptures often look innocuous at first. It is only gradually that you realise what they are saying, but these drawings are urgent, direct and immediate. The vivid red wash makes it look as though they have been drawn in blood. Their rawness is often shocking.
Several of childbirth are even violent, but others are tender and beautiful. In The Couple, for instance, two blobs of red, close together on the page, have run into parallel vertical lines of feathery wash. Appropriately to this garden context, they become flowers, but they are also human figures. Visibly characterised as male and female, they are lovers, joined by two smaller lateral runs of wash that read respectively as arms extended in an embrace and an erect penis; but they could still be flowers, too, and the exchange between them might equally be the kind of fertilisation process illustrated by some of the Hutton Balfour drawings.
In a further group of 12 drawings hung together in a block, Bourgeois has developed this theme. A man makes love to a woman who is also a flower. She has five petals around her neck; five the artist says, for the five members of her immediate family, and so she has called this group The Family. In a further series of 20 small drawings she develops that thought further. They are called Self-Portrait, and if that is indeed what they represent, they offer an extraordinary image of herself in metamorphosis. A woman becomes a flower as her breasts multiply into a ring of petals. The artist sees herself as a flower in the garden, as though the exhibition itself in its garden location offered her this chance of metamorphosis. In perhaps the most startling drawing of all, however, called Pregnant Woman, these petals have become grotesque, multiple breasts and belly. Recalling one of those extraordinary lumpy female figures, all breasts, belly and buttocks, that are among the earliest known human art works, she seems to be the Mother Goddess herself, resurrected in this nature study.
In a drawing called simply Femme, which hangs alone to greet you as you enter, the hair of a naked female figure is turning into the eight legs of a spider. The spider is nature's weaver. Bourgeois put a giant spider into the turbine hall at Tate Modern. She called it Maman after her own mother, who was indeed a weaver, and so it is a signature image for her. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the nymph Arachne, a weaver of wonderful skill, was turned into a spider by Minerva as punishment for her temerity in challenging the goddess to a contest. Minerva had manifested herself disguised as an old woman. She suggests to Arachne that she should respect the experience that comes with age, but in response Arachne compounded her crime: as well as challenging Minerva's skill, she insulted her age.
There is a bit of a double-take here. This may be another self-portrait, this time in the guise of the nymph and weaver Arachne, but at 96, maybe Bourgeois also aligns herself with Minerva to claim the wisdom of age. These drawings show she has every right to do so. Only experience could bring such a powerful combination of depth, economy and fierce clarity.
• Until 6 July
The full article contains 1269 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
