Louise Bourgeois and Briony Tallis

“A lot of people are so obsessed by the past, they die of it. This is the attitude of the poet who never finds the lost heaven, and it is really the situation of artists who work for a reason that nobody can quite grasp. Except that they might want to reconstruct something of the past. It is that the past for certain people has such a hold and such a beauty…”

- Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father

Destruction of the Father by Louise Bourgeois

Fabulous looking Louise Bourgeois

Atonement (2007)

James McAvoy as Robbie Turner and Keira Knightley as Cecilia Tallis

Saoirse Ronan as Briony Tallis (age 13)

Vanessa Redgrave as Briony Tallis (age 77)

I am currently fascinated by ideas of:

childhood
lens of a child
re-creating a story
one's attempt to re-create the past which becomes a ritualistic obsession
and how all of these come together as an endless source in my own art making


Major impetus of my art making is to reconcile what has been lost or morphed in childhood through visual forms to convey a poetic poignancy and sympathy from the audience. The film Atonement beautifully depicts a thirteen-year-old girl Briony Tallis’ perception about the happenings around her. This specific notion of ‘lens of child’ and the unchangeable consequences of actions Briony takes with her child instincts was eye opening for my own interpretation of childhood and post-effects of dramatic events. This journey of untangling the morphed memories and relationships takes a toll on Briony until her old age, yet it reveals about how one can live in the childhood with some sort of re-created fantasy, guilt, and remorse. At the end of the film, Briony is an aged author who writes a memoir which rewrites a traumatic story of her older sister Cecilia and her lover into one which they all hoped for.

So I started to draw this parallel between Louise Bourgeois, an artist who's obsessed with her childhood memories in her art making, and this character Briony Tallis. I think they definitely could have been good friends for each other.


Maybe I could be their friends, too.



- G.