page_title: Maman (sculpture)
section_title: Philosophy and meaning
hierarchical_section_title: Maman (sculpture) / Philosophy and meaning
caption_attribution_description: English: Spider&#160;! "A nightmare unleashed at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall" is how one paper described this installation by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
context_page_description: Maman is a bronze, stainless steel, and marble sculpture by the artist Louise Bourgeois. The sculpture, which depicts a spider, is among the world's largest, measuring over 30 ft high and over 33 ft wide. It includes a sac containing 32 marble eggs and its abdomen and thorax are made of ribbed bronze.
  The title is the familiar French word for Mother. The sculpture was created in 1999 by Bourgeois as a part of her inaugural commission of The Unilever Series, in the Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern. This original was created in steel, with an edition of six subsequent castings in bronze.
  Bourgeois chose the Modern Art Foundry to cast the sculpture because of its reputation and work.
context_section_description: The sculpture picks up the theme of the arachnid that Bourgeois had first contemplated in a small ink and charcoal drawing in 1947, continuing with her 1996 sculpture Spider. It alludes to the strength of Bourgeois' mother, with metaphors of spinning, weaving, nurture and protection. Her mother, Josephine, was a woman who repaired tapestries in her father's textile restoration workshop in Paris. When Bourgeois was twenty-one, she lost her mother to an unknown illness. A few days after her mother's passing, in front of her father (who did not seem to take his daughter's despair seriously), Louise threw herself into the Bièvre River; he swam to her rescue.
  The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver.  My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.
  — Louise Bourgeois
caption: The original 1999 stainless steel Spider at the Tate Modern in 2009
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