Discover Louise Bourgeois’ powerful textile works at the Hayward Gallery

Louise Bourgeois grew up surrounded by textiles: her family lived above their tapestry restoration workshop in France, and she would often help repair worn designs. Although the late artist spent much of her career conjuring giant sculptures out of steel, bronze and marble, she returned to the materials of her youth in her 80s, making artworks from clothing, tapestries, bed linen and handkerchiefs until her death in 2010. Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child at London’s Hayward Gallery (9 February – 15 May) is the first retrospective to focus on textile works from the final two decades of her career.

For an artist who often explored the traumas of her childhood, it seems natural that she would use materials so closely bound to it. She viewed the act of ripping, cutting, sewing and joining the fabric in psychological and metaphorical terms, as ways to explore both the emotions of separation and of reparation.

‘I have always had a fascination with the magic power of the needle,’ she once said. ‘The needle is used to repair the damage. It's a claim to forgiveness.’

Suspended from the ceiling or positioned in vitrines at the Hayward Gallery, her fabric figures – largely of female bodies – suggest states of abandonment or abjection. Bourgeois also repeatedly returned to the form of the spider, a symbol of protection and entrapment that she associated with her mother, a weaver and tapestry restorer. The exhibition will include Spider (1997), which incorporates fragments of antique tapestry, while the related Lady in Waiting (2003) – one of her monumental Cells series – includes nightwear and dresses. Her use of such fabrics ‘imbues her late sculptures with a striking sense of intimacy, vulnerability and mortality,’ says Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff.

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child sums up this inventive and compelling final chapter in this extraordinary artist’s work.