Ning-Hui Chung

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a French-American sculptor known for exploring memory, trauma, and motherhood. Using materials such as fabric, metal, and glass, she transformed psychological experiences into physical forms. A pioneer of feminist and psychoanalytic sculpture, Bourgeois centered emotion as the language of creation.

The Cells series (1989–2008) consists of enclosed chambers built from steel cages and found objects, each embodying an emotional state—fear, memory, solitude, or desire. By juxtaposing domestic materials with bodily fragments, Bourgeois transforms private memory into spatial experience, inviting viewers to step inside her inner architecture.

Louise Bourgeois’s Cells transform architecture into emotion. Her material framework—steel cages, fabrics, mirrors, and domestic relics—turns ordinary matter into psychological architecture. The materials’ duality of softness and coldness mirrors emotional contradictions: tenderness and anxiety, intimacy and fear. Through assemblage, she reconstructs found objects into symbolic systems, embodying the psychoanalytic idea of repressed memory made visible.

Her spatial logic echoes Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, where rooms and corners become metaphors for the soul. Bourgeois materializes these metaphors, turning sculpture into a dwelling of memory and feeling. Her practice also aligns with Julia Kristeva’s theory of melancholia—the transformation of trauma into form as a way of emotional regeneration.

In my own sculptural practice, Bourgeois inspires me to treat space as a psychological field. She teaches that emotion can be structural and memory can be material. In my miniature sculptures, I aim to evoke similar emotional resonance—through contrasts of openness and containment, transparency and solidity—creating intimate spaces that embody the tension between inner self and outer world. Bourgeois reminds me that sculpture can house not just form, but the architecture of feeling.

#Psychological Space #Memory and Trauma #Feminist Art #Architecture of Emotion #Poetics of Space #Assemblage Art #Materiality of Emotion #Sculpture and Psychoanalysis

Image credits and wbsite:

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/louise-bourgeois-cell-the-last-climb

https://www.wallpaper.com/art/louise-bourgeois-cells-at-the-bilbao-guggenheim

Written on: 17 August 2025