Art review: Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study

Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden

THERE is, I think, something innately cringe-making about the associations sometimes drawn between women artists and nature. It might start harmlessly enough, but before you know it you're making vast generalisations about nature and culture or straying off into Flake advert territory of floppy hats and poppy fields. So it was with some trepidation that I approached Nature Study, an exhibition at Inverleith House that places recent work by the fierce and indomitable 96-year-old artist Louise Bourgeois in the context of the Royal Botanic Garden's own history of botanical scholarship and education.

Luckily, Bourgeois is such a senior and singular figure that the exercise merely sheds an interesting new bit of light on an established oeuvre rather than profoundly shaping our understanding of it. In a series of 23 new crimson gouache drawings and three sculptures, she appears to see nature as brutal, bloody and unforgiving: a cycle of sex and parenthood, reproduction and nurturing, subject to an insatiable hunger on the part of both parent and child.

As an artist she is in a category of her own, a great survivor through successive eras of surrealism, abstract expressionism, minimalism and after. Having achieved late recognition in her 70s, her body of work is increasingly understood to be at the heart of things rather than the margins where it once had been placed. Her personal biography, a childhood of French privilege scarred by familial conflicts, forms a deep well upon which her art draws. Drawing, too, has been fundamental to her artistic practice since the 1940s.

The companion exhibition devoted to the 19th-century teaching aids and botanical diagrams commissioned by John Hutton Balfour, one of the garden's great Regius Keepers, reveals an aesthetic that for teaching purposes is exaggerated and intriguingly mechanistic, and a selection interested in some of the more dramatic byways of botany such as insectivorous plants. Both floors combine an economy of visual means with distinctive vocabularies, and there are at times uncanny, but entirely coincidental, echoes between the shows.

Bourgeois' show begins with a single drawing, Femme, a scarlet female whose hair is a living, writhing mass. At first she might be mistaken for Medusa, but it is more likely she is Arachne, the weaver whose arrogance and hubris was punished by her transformation into a spider.

This, of course, is vintage Bourgeois territory. After devoting much of her career to her dismay and anger at her philandering father, she has spent the last decade or so reconciling with the patient, diligent figure of her mother, through evocation of the family tapestry business, wool and weaving, but above all through the image of the spider.

This drawing is about the moment of metamorphosis; it is unstable and slippery. The theme is echoed later in the show in a pink stone sculpture, Topiary, where elements of a female body transmogrify into an elaborate and geometric plant structure, but the rigid stone cannot compare to the fluid line of scarlet paint.

This scarlet, a recent development, has unavoidable associations with blood, and Bourgeois is unafraid of the implications. Her sequences of images of birth portray it as wrenching and bloody experience. Pregnancy is a kind of internal gnawing that evokes both classic anatomical drawings and the image of the homunculus: that tiny, fully formed man once understood to form sperm.

Among the most startling images are those of breast-feeding, in which traditional Madonna imagery has been replaced by a kind of mutual dependency in which mother and child share hunger and rage as much as love. The parental relationship, she implies, is ever-shifting. As a vigorous young woman, she once nursed her own mother. She has brought up both natural children and an adopted son. Bourgeois, we realise, is herself now vulnerable: defiantly focused on making her art, yet dependent on others for practical support.

Inverleith House, not noted for its support of women artists, has, over the years, made an exception for the biggest and most senior hitters such as Roni Horn, the painter Agnes Martin and now Bourgeois. Interestingly, among the handful of younger women to have had a solo show in the gallery has been Glasgow's Cathy Wilkes, nominated deservedly for the Turner Prize last week. It isn't too outrageous to compare Wilkes and Bourgeois while acknowledging the gulf of age and experience between them.

They are both artists who have remained ever true to their own interests and personal stories. Both artists are interested in the invisibility of female labour and the use of found materials. It's cheering to think of Wilkes' work reaching new prominence this year. And more cheering still that Bourgeois, at 96, remains a vital and distinctive voice.

• Until July 6