Ode à Ma Mère (detail), 1995

Bourgeois was involved in her family’s tapestry restoration business from a young age, when she was tasked with drawing in missing or worn areas of tapestries that needed repair. Her mother Joséphine, a skilled weaver, managed the workshop and spent hours in the sun reweaving old textiles. Bourgeois remembered her this way decades later, around the time she began to explore the spider motif. For her, the spider was symbolic of both her mother and of her own working process. The spider weaves its web diligently and without complaint, much like her mother calmly repaired broken things and made them whole.