Louise Bourgeois exhibition at New Gallery

Born in 1911, French sculptor Louise Bourgeois is the oldest living artist in Mixed-Up Childhood. Her status in the art world is confirmed by the several-storey high spiders she created for the opening of London's enormous Tate Modern gallery that are equally maternal and ominous. She has worked with a variety of media and scales, from her gigantic steel and marble spiders to recent explorations in needlecraft, but always with a strong emotional pull.

With its dirty, cracked windows and old wooden furniture contrasting with the pristine glass balls inside, Cell emphasises interior and exterior relationships. The cage-like structure demonstrates Bourgeois' masterful use of materials, which is evident from the strong, emotional resonance this work retains and the way the elements seem to communicate to each other, despite inhabiting the sterile environment of a white-walled gallery.

The title is ambiguous, shifting between micro and macro-cosmic relationships, simultaneously suggesting imprisonment, a group, a family unit or tiny units of matter.
"I think it's an exquisite piece," says exhibition co-curator Janita Craw. "There is both a sense of danger and of fragility - and mystique.

"It offers something really interesting about family and power relationships. Bourgeois talks about her glass balls being unavailable 'emotional bubbles' - they're not the delicate soap bubbles you find in earlier romantic or nostalgic images of childhood."

Her claustrophobic structures often use or refer to everyday elements like garden sheds, but there is only enough detail to evoke associations while still remaining mysterious, bordering on abstract. She has described the bubbles as representing family members, at once transparent but also sealed off and impenetrable.

"I'm interested in the way many of the artists in the show have for some time in their careers built an aesthetic on an intellectualised idea of childhood," says Craw. "They often acknowledge but sometimes ignore elements of their own lived experiences."

"All my subjects have found their inspiration in my childhood," Bourgeois has said.

Although she has spent many years creating works that excavate her memories of childhood experiences, the traumatic nature of her upbringing was only made explicit when she labelled a 1982 Artforum magazine page work "child abuse".

Born to a well-off Parisian family, her chances of an idyllic childhood were lost to a rocky family life in which her philandering father moved his English mistress in, employing her as Bourgeois' governess for 10 years.

But Craw also detects an optimistic note: "I understand the walls are excavated from her own garden shed and, in spite of the chains, it's not without a sense of belief in a fairy tale or secret garden magic. If only the hands were magician's hands."

Exhibition

*What: Cell, by Louise Bourgeois in Mixed-Up Childhood
*Where and when: New Gallery, to May 29