Louise Bourgeois and viewpoint ideals #truth/me also

I was about to write a blog on Louise Bourgeois but then I had a feeling I'd already done one! Here was the blog I started after watching her dvd and a personal account that I'd forgotten I'd even started. A few months old and a little long winded as usual, but true in the sense I didn't hold back. Started drunken then the next day, and continued today.



feeling drunk!

what does the drunk me think so far, well in different really!

I still feel apart from drunk stronger than I did a few weeks ago but also frightened.. frightened of the unknown. am i going to be like this forever... i finally watched the Louise bourgeois dvd tonight. the memories from her childhood still affect her into her 90's.

My doctor told me I'd never rid myself of my condition fully. Its me and will continue to be me. do my thoughts seems insanity and that of a troubled mind..... or is it just truth in the same way everyone feels. Have i just let my anxiety trouble and effect me for best part of 15 years..
Louise was troubled with this too and it gave her a great sense and order to her work. I feel like  i should embrace it and let it take control when it come to my work...

Morning after and my panic is strong, the words hanging by a thread came to mind.  im frightened really frightened and can't help but want comfort for someone.... (mother)(doctor)(anyone) to be told im alright and gonna be alright... i felt my heart in my chest beating so hard and I couldn't sleep.. insomnia kicking in.. i took tablets to calm me down but i feel shit about having to take them. also thought about stopping drinking and i know ill probably give in. thought about an aa meeting to really bring out the true side of alcohol, not that i'm a alcoholic but it does mess with you emotionally......drew a circle which had a shaky line down the middle... in the centre a smaller circle.... i think this is my fear or myself!    thats where the thread reference came from too.

what is this fear! Nothing as such, fear of death and leaving my children, fear of something terrible happening to me....health wise.... exhausted i feel and little wonder having a steam train running inside my head even in most dreams.  with the panic my chest feels tight... this frightens me... its probably wind from over breathing.... funny how i know what happening and im kinda OK with that, but the other side of me, tells me to worry... battling against one another... guess this is GAD....

I feel lucky to get this far on my journey with mental health, to actually battle my way through it has taken courage no end. i'm active with it and taking back some control... Days like these dont help tho. fact!!
I learnt a lesson last night to, be careful who you open up to. not everyone cares about your feelings as much as you. why are people so harsh? Were all


TODAY

Not sure how long ago I wrote this! Whats changed from then?    Not a lot really, I still feel I'm on the roundabout stuck in this ride. But also being pro-active as usual.  The people around you can affect you I have realised too. If not in the real world, then in the sleeping dream state. Is it them torturing me or me torturing myself.  Learnt behavior, well if it is I do think I've taken it to a new evolutionary state.


Im tired, tired of thinking, worrying and over giving a shit!


Louise Bourgeois

Louise's work was heavily influenced by traumatic psychological events from her childhood, particularly her father's infidelity.  Her work does include a body of topics that are open for study or discussion. Many involving the unconscious, sexual desire, and the body. These themes draw on events in her childhood for which she considered making art a therapeutic or cathartic process.

• Bourgeois transformed her experiences into a highly personal visual language through the use of mythological and archetypal imagery, adopting objects such as spirals, spiders, cages, medical tools, and sewn appendages to symbolize the feminine psyche, beauty, and psychological pain
• She would, for example, use rough or hard materials most strongly associated with masculinity to sculpt soft biomorphic forms suggestive of femininity.

This for me without even considering the art itself speaks volumes, Question is do I want to bring my emotions out? Without fear standing in the way, fuck hell yeah!   This summer I think instead of doing mindfulness or whatever shite, I might just strip back my own self and see what appears! The small frightened girl that for me keeps surfacing time and time again, needs to be brought out as well as a few other memories or horrors. Enlightenment, my enlightenment! Troble is my ideas are always massive.... real life size if not bigger scale. if I could explain it for me it's the difference between a powerwalk and 3 full marathon's all driven and running on empty, the mechanical process of the legs running with the body having no control to stop them. Haunted, tortured and exhausted without any sense of the end. one quicken step after the other, on and on and on, body slumped over almost unable to keep itself up.

Anyway back to Louise's work

Fillette

 


showcases her use of biomorphic imagery as well as her experiments with and distortions of both male and female anatomy, often to the point that they become indistinguishable. Here, the testicles can also be read as breasts and the erect penis can be seen as a neck. The bizarre juxtaposition of the title, which means little girl in English, and the priapism of the work suggests a girl metamorphosed into that which threatens her.


Destruction of the father

Im not sure I understand these images!

The work was also Bourgeois's first to explicitly reveal her anger over her father's infidelity, which was an underlying motivation for much of her work. Relying on the soft forms of her Landscape series and her often explicit body imagery, the work reenacts a childhood fantasy wherein she takes revenge on her father, who always gloated and bragged at the dinner table. A life-size dining table in a cave or womb-like space is covered with flesh-colored anthropomorphic forms that appear like dismembered body parts as well as actual joints of lamb, which underscore implied violence. The scene is bathed in a soft red light that symbolizes anger, death, and blood, inviting the viewer to witness the aftermath of the killing.

Maman

 

Louise's quote about the work.

 Bourgeois is explicit about this connection: "The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. . . Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother."

I like how the simple childlike explanation comes across in this work but speaks out on so many different levels.  Something we would like to think a mother could be or is.

Spiral Woman

I do like the soft petticoat hanging and the way you feel as though you spying into a room or private almost sexual scene you maybe shouldn't be .

 As with so much of Bourgeois's oeuvre (work), the spiral had autobiographical significance for her, as she stated in the following: "It is a twist. As a child, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and ring them. . . Later I would dream of my father's mistress. I would do it in my dreams by ringing her neck. The spiral - I love the spiral - represents control and freedom."


Powerful and moving and I really feel I can relate to her childlike and emotional senses... If I could tap into mine now I think it may help draw a line under a few things pulling me back.