COLLECTION NAME:
Undergraduate Thesis Collection
Record
Title:
Reconciling the Hierarchical Divide: Louise Bourgeois’s Spider
Creator:
Ulmer, Katelynn
Subject:
Thesis (B.F.A.) -- Art History
Subject:
Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Art History
Rights:
Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Abstract:
“Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a French-American artist whose work spanned several decades of the mid-twentieth century. Her most notable works are her large-scale sculptures, but she has also worked in a variety of media including painting and printmaking. After growing up in a textile restoration workshop and being exposed to weaving from a very young age, Bourgeois would later incorporate an understanding of weaving’s structure throughout her oeuvre. Weaving’s tension between warp and weft ultimately results in the creation of a third element: the textile itself. This provides a metaphor for Bourgeois as her work often rejects the dichotomies so ingrained in Western society, such as mind and body, decoration and structure, and male and female. This metaphor comes to fruition for Bourgeois with her use of the spider in her distinguished sculpture titled Spider (1997). The arachnid is synonymous with weaving not just in a Western context, but cross-culturally as well. By first examining the Western tradition of the spider as weaver in the Ovidian myth of Arachne, this essay describes how Bourgeois understands and navigates hierarchical divides within Western society. After reviewing the creation myths of spiders cross-culturally, the myth of the spider in non-Western settings reveals a fluidity between these dichotomies, rather than a strict division. This research provides a review of current scholarship on Bourgeois’s work and how it lacks attention to weaving and to the myth of the spider within her oeuvre. With stronger attention to weaving and the spider myths cross-culturally, this essay will uncover how Louise Bourgeois reconciles the West’s gendered and oppositional power structure by using non-Western weaving perspective and myth in her work.” –Abstract
Keywords: Louise Bourgeois, myth of Arachne, spider, Spider (1997), textile, weaving, weaving metaphor.
Keywords: Louise Bourgeois, myth of Arachne, spider, Spider (1997), textile, weaving, weaving metaphor.
Publisher:
Savannah, Georgia: Savannah College of Art and Design
Date:
2020-05
Format:
1 online resource: 1 PDF (Thesis, 64 pages, color illustrations)