“Spirals are a plea. Today I am No. 1 personality... tomorrow, I am No. 2. They are a plea to be accepted with many different moods... a plea for love.”
—Louise Bourgeois Within Louise Bourgeois’s overall investigation of abstract motifs, the spiral holds a distinct place, recurring across her oeuvre. The spiral manifests in segmented wood sculptures of the 1950s, a plaster, tomb-like mound from the 1960s, a hanging bronze sculpture in the 1980s, and in a 1990 performance piece She Lost It, in which Bourgeois wrapped and unwrapped performers in a spiraling gauze banner measuring nearly 200 feet long.
Bourgeois’ earliest encounter with the spiral form occurred in childhood, watching workers in her family’s tapestry restoration business wash tapestries in the river then fiercely wring them out, a memory Bourgeois has described as morphing into a visually parallel fantasy of wringing the neck of someone she despised. The spiral continued to function as a visual metaphor for a range of Bourgeois’ varying emotions across her life and the strategy she evolved to be tolerated, accepted and loved despite her oscillating moods.
“The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos.”
—Louise Bourgeois
Bourgeois stressed the spiral’s two opposing directions: inward and outward. The outward movement represented “giving, and giving up control, trust and positive energy….” While the winding in of the spiral embodied “a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance.” She said, “You can get twisted and strangled by your emotions.” Always reflecting her volatile temperament, Bourgeois’s spirals are endlessly variable—as coils of tension, protective cocoons, and even entrapping spider webs.
