Posthuman Materiality: Louis Bourgeois
Maman, Louis Bourgeois, 1999
I love Louise Bourgeois’s Maman. The spider appears both intimidating and fragile as a metaphor for her mother, who was a weaver and protector. Through this work, Bourgeois mourns her mother’s loss and expresses the pain of grief. Maman becomes a way to process trauma and memory, transforming personal sorrow into monumental form. The spider embodies contradiction: frightening yet nurturing, delicate yet powerful. Those are the qualities I also aspire to capture in my own work.
Like Bourgeois, I use art to process trauma and loss. Rather than creating realistic images of my scars or altered body, I use organic, organism-like forms to express them. This abstraction allows me to communicate the pain of living with an altered body in a more emotional and poetic way. I am drawn to the tension Bourgeois creates between intimidation and fragility, as it mirrors my own feelings toward my body. They are fragile, yet sometimes difficult or unsettling to confront.
I’m also fascinated by the scale of Maman. At around nine meters tall and ten meters wide, it towers above viewers like an immense guardian or threat. Its monumental size reverses the usual power dynamic between human and insect, something once feared or crushed becomes overwhelmingly dominant. By enlarging the spider, Bourgeois turns private memory into public experience, inviting viewers to step inside her psychological landscape and physically engage with her grief.
From a posthuman materiality perspective, Maman’s scale shifts the human from observer to participant. The viewer is no longer central but becomes small, embedded, and coexisting within the spider’s world. The sculpture asserts the agency of the nonhuman. It is not passive, but active, surrounding and affecting us. Inspired by this, I have also begun creating larger sculptures whose physical presence evokes both fear and awe, while still carrying an inner sense of vulnerability.
Wikipedia. “Maman (sculpture).” Wikipedia, last modified October 3, 2025, 19:13. Accessed Sep 17, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maman_(sculpture)
