I first saw Louise Bourgeois’s work in 1995 in an exhibition at Tate Britain (then just ‘Tate’) called Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century, curated by Stuart Morgan. I didn’t know him then, but after that I became very good friends with Stuart, and he always said to me, if he had known me when he curated that show, he would have definitely put me in it. And he would have put me next to Louise, he said - I’d really get on well with his friend Louise.
As time went on, I started seeing her work everywhere. I went to Melbourne, where Louise had an exhibition of prints, and the date on one of them said something like 1949 or 1955. But I just thought, she’s like me, she puts a date on something according to what she feels about it. When I looked at her etchings, I thought, my God, these look like the genuine, surrealist article. But I still thought she was the same age as me - this woman, making work that really spoke to me. She was just Louise, a friend of Stuart’s. I’d never read about her, it never occurred to me that she was old. When I found out that she was born in 1911, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe the physicality of her work, the big and the small of it. I was so impressed.
