Pins, needles and Louise Bourgeois’ giant spiders

Last January, the house I grew up in was empty. My mother had moved in with one of my sisters. Over the spring and summer, we emptied shelves and found new homes for family things, trying to hold on to memories while preparing the house for sale.

My parents owned that house for over forty years. Scuffs in the paint, knocks to the doorframe, paint splashes on the basement stairs. Four kids meant wear and tear, and over the years, my parents devoted a lot of time to mending and tending the house, telling us kids not to shake the floorboards. I understand now. I have a house of my own and do the same. I tell my kids houses don’t heal. We need to look after them and fix them.

Femme Maison

This brings to my mind the artist Louise Bourgeois and her Femme Maison images. Not of woman as housewife, but woman as house. In sketches and paintings, she used the house as an analogy for body and spirit, making a statement about shelter, confinement and identity. There is a tension in her work between architecture and the body. Both are equally strong and vulnerable. Bourgeois worked on this series during the late 1940s, so I wonder if she might also have been depicting the effect of war on cities and families. I think of Picasso’s Guernica. I think of Gaza.

I think, too, of Peter’s epistle and his image of people as living stones built into a spiritual house. Built together, people can become a form of shelter, an adaptive dwelling place made solid by the chosen cornerstone. What might it mean to seek healing for these living stones? Or to mend a spiritual house? How might we begin?

Needles as forgiveness

Later in her career, Bourgeois created giant, building-sized spiders in steel and bronze. One – Maman – sits in front of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, her legs 30 feet high, and her heavy abdomen carrying a clutch of marble eggs. Through these massive spider sculptures, Bourgeois playfully expressed her own mother’s strength. Her mother’s work was restoring old tapestries, so Bourgeois’s spiders explore metaphors of spinning, weaving, repairing and what it means.

She wrote: “When I was growing up, all the women in my house used needles. I’ve always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.”

When we put a pin in something, we’re trying to hold it down. To keep it in place. We think we can circle back if we can just hold steady. But needles are different. Needles create and restore. We’re stitched together in our mother’s womb and warned about the narrow eye of the needle. Maybe with needles and knowing, we can make a mended place – renewed, forgiven, extended – a stronger, stretching shelter for the lives we live together.