Maman (Louise Bourgeois)

Maman is a monumental spider sculpture created in 1999 by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, standing over nine metres tall and cast in several editions in bronze, stainless steel and marble that are now installed at museums around the world, including Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the National Gallery of Canada. Bourgeois, whose mother worked restoring tapestries in the family's workshop, intended the spider as a tribute to her mother's skill, patience and protectiveness, describing the sculpture as a defender rather than a predator despite its immense and initially unsettling scale. It has become one of the most widely recognized works of contemporary public sculpture.