Curator, Sarah Suzuki: Louise Bourgeois is someone who is a real book person. She loves the idea of literature, and she herself has written her own kind of poetic text fragments, to accompany work that she's done over the years.
So, in this book, Ode a L’Oublie, or Ode to Forgetting, you can see these fabric pages are interspersed with short texts. And these are all short texts of her writing.
This book is a facsimile copy of a book that she made that was incredibly personal to her. The first version of the book was actually all made with textiles that she had collected over the years. So the cover of the book was one of the napkins from her trousseau when she was married. And it has those monogrammed initials on the front. And the pieces inside were clipped from tablecloths that she had kept, from nightgowns, from other pieces of clothing. These were things that she had loved, in some way. So, it becomes an incredible compendium of personal history
What you're seeing here is not made from her original trousseau napkin. But it is made by exactly replicating each of the fabrics in the book, down to stains that were on them.
And the beauty of this editioned version is that they very cleverly came up with an idea for a binding in which all the pages would button in. So, if you wanted to, you could open the book, and unbutton all the pages, and hang them all independently, so you could see them all at once.