while you're ahead…

… One more post about my trip and then I’ll stop, I promise!

I didn’t know much about the sculptor Louise Bourgeois aside from her giant spider sculptures and her later life visceral prints… as a matter of fact one of her spiders was on show at the MoMA and boy, that thing was HUGE.  Seriously big.  Fascinating in a creepy kind of way…  what I had always wanted to see however were her fabric books.

Late in her life she decided she didn’t need all the clothes and linen she’d accumulated all her life so she started cutting into them … and made this incredibly neat, colourful, fantastic books with them.

Some pages are patchwork, some are prints… all together are breathtaking.

“you can… remember your life by the shape, the weight, the colour, the smell of the clothes in your closet”  LB

How amazing are those?  Inspiring, right?  Perhaps instead of making quilts nobody wants I should make fabric books… little mini quilts…

I really like how she puts button holes in the margin to bind the pages together.  Genius.

There were also some great prints too, strikingly contemporary…  Louise died in 2010 at 98 and her story is fascinating… born in France in 1911, moved to the States in 1940, produced huge amounts of work, from sculptures, to drawings to prints and works in fabrics… till a week before her death.  I kind of regret not buying the catalogue of the exhibition now…

“it is not an image I am seeking.  It’s not an idea.  

It is an emotion you want to recreate”

… just not too keen on those spiders…

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