“[a tree is] a symbol of a person. It has the right to exist, to grow and procreate.”
R ich with connotations, both personal and primal, Topiary II represents Louise Bourgeois’ exquisite activation of human forms to reveal fundamental truths. Titled after the traditional art of clipping plants into ornamental shapes, the present work touches upon themes of interventions on natural growth and is part of a series of works of various media which Bourgeois completed in the late 1990s early 2000s. A sublime sculpture of a female form transforming into a heavily branched tree perched with elegant beading, the present work is both ethereal and substantial in subject matter. By playing with the traditional idea of “woman as nature” often represented as vertical and allied with earth, Bourgeois is subverting ideas of female identity by depicting the figure of a woman vertically, rooted in the soil but reaching towards the sky. The suggestive title of the present work may point towards the dramatic mutilation of female identities that are often thought of as mere sniping and shaping. The struggle to repair after surviving emotional damages, in the way plants grow after being shaped as topiaries, is a fundamental theme in Bourgeois’ practice that can be strongly felt in the present work.
Topiary II depicts a surreal and imaginative form by way of an anthropomorphized tree. Bourgeois’ was heavily influenced by elements of nature as figures she aimed to recreate in her art. She saw germination and growth in nature also in human terms. For Bourgeois, the figure of a woman transforming into a tree represents growth, change, groundedness, and progress. Her artistic themes are deeply rooted in her psychological biography, which began with a strained childhood complicated by paternal infidelities and maternal illnesses. Bourgeois also struggled with the inherent conflicts of feminism in universal terms and in personal terms, societal norms versus individual choice, anxiety and depression, passivity versus action. These anxieties, thoughts, and opinions are felt in the present work by way of an elegant and refined work of sculpture.
