A friend of mine who is studying fine art, told me about this artist Louise Bourgeois. Apparantely she's quite well known in Britain, having made a giant spider sculpture based outside the Tate Modern, London, a few years ago. And, being an art lover myself, I'm really suprised not to have heard of her before.
I researched her work online and you know when you can just relate to something? I love the concepts behind her work and her thought processes. She included a lot of her past experiences into her work, expressed past relationships and negative thoughts into her fine art installations.
The pieces I looked at were very emotion based and expressed feelings of confinement, fear, isolation and lonliness. As I was concentrating on gaining inspiration from my nightmares over the summer, I just felt a link with her way of thinking.
This is a page I scanned from my sketch book which contains an image of one of her art installations - "the cells - glass spheres and hands."
Bourgeois explains that the 'cells' represent different types of pain - "the emotional, the physical, the pyscological, the mental and intellectual. When does the emotional become the physical? When does the physical become the emotional? It's a circle going round and round. Pain can begin at any point and move in any direction."
This ideology is represented very literally through the 3D spheres. It't not an obvious theory from glancing at the sculptures first off and I suppose the spheres can be interpreted very differently from each person who views them. I can feel what she's trying to portray through the shapes, the feeling of confinement, frustration and emptiness, but they could represent anything you imagine them to be.
These are more pages from my sketchbook. The top right is her most recognised piece - the giant spider.
What was she trying to say with this? Why would she want to recreate the monster that terrifies so many people, a thousand times it's normal size and place it in the middle of London?
Maybe we must face our fears in order to move on with our lives?
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