The Spider and the Tapestries

The Spider and the Tapestries gathers the fabric-based works Louise Bourgeois made in the last years of her life, in which mending and repair become both a literal craft and a psychological act.

The book reproduces sculptures built from salvaged tapestry fragments and needlepoint alongside archival photographs of the Bourgeois family's Paris workshop, where her parents restored antique wall hangings, and excerpts from the artist's own psychoanalytic writings that link the spider motif to her mother. It was first issued as a limited edition for Louise Bourgeois: L'Araignee et les Tapisseries at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, in 2014, and reprinted by Hatje Cantz the following year in this hardcover trade edition.

For Bourgeois, the spider was never simply an insect but a stand-in for her mother, a weaver whom she once described as "deliberate, clever, patient... and as useful as a spider." The tapestry works extend a lifelong engagement with textile as autobiography, connecting the room-sized Cells and bronze spiders of her sculptural practice back to the sewing table of her childhood.