Louise Bourgeois is best known for her massive-scale sculpture and installation art in which the larger-than-life spiders are a defining moment in her career. Bourgeois’ work often centres on themes of motherhood, memory, the body, and exploring the complex emotions associated with personal experience and relationships. Maman, standing at nine metres high at Qatar’s National Convention Centre, is an ode to Bourgeois’ own mother who passed away when she was just twenty-one: a formative moment in her life and artistic development. Building on the metaphorical relationship between her mother’s work as a weaver and the spider’s natural behaviour, Bourgeois’ spider not only evokes imagery of spinning and weaving but also protects its eggs in a steel cage-like body. Bourgeois’ Maman captures a deeply personal moment of maternal protection where a mother carries her eggs and symbolizes their nurturing and protective qualities. By using steel, marble, and bronze, all durable and classical metals and stones, it embodies the strength of her own mother. In many ways, Maman connects viewers to universal themes surrounding the early stages of life, birth, and the intimate bond between mother and child.