Bourgeois was the first female to have a retrospective at MoMA in New York back in 1982, and another major retrospective is planned for London's Tate Modern in 2007. In the meantime, the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny has scored quite a coup with its current exhibition, which focuses on Bourgeois's recent prints on fabric.

By sewing and using fabric as a material, Bourgeois is in a sense returning to her roots . . . her family ran a tapestry restoration business in France. The works in this exhibition thus have a particularly personal dimension, especially as she recycles old fabrics found in her home . . . some dating from as far back as the 1920s.

While she uses autobiographical memories for inspiration, Bourgeois's work transcends individual history to become an archetypal exploration of human emotions, experiences and anxieties. The centrepiece of the exhibition is 'Ode a L'Oubli' (Ode to Forgetfulness, 2004), a 36-page fabric book, with each page displayed individually. In this book, she has stitched together memories, thoughts and images from the past, with each page featuring a different abstract design and using a variety of stitching patterns, colours and fabrics. Some designs are recognisable from other works by Bourgeois, such as cell-like shapes and pyramids, while others seem to echo hardedged modernist paintings, yet made here in a feminine craft-like medium. The unreliable and unpredictable nature of memory is examined in two pages which feature the phrases: "The return of the repressed" and "I had a flashback of something that never existed".

The realm of the unconscious and the blissful forgetfulness of sleep are evoked in the most recent work, 'Lullaby' (2006), a series of 25 silkscreens on fabric.

Musical staves have been printed onto the fabric to mimic sheet music, and superimposed on top of each one is a red amoeboid blob. These shapes have a Rorschach-blot effect, summoning up unconscious, primal associations. The overall impact is soothing and calming, the visual equivalent of a lullaby. Significantly, Bourgeois once said: "I am an insomniac, so for me the state of being asleep is paradise. It is a paradise I can never reach. . . My drawings are a kind of rocking or stroking, and an attempt at finding a kind of peace."

Many of the lithographs and drypoint etchings have been printed onto old linen napkins or tablecloths; the creases are still visible and there are occasional stains. The printed images often display Bourgeois's wry sense of humour, but others are poignant: in 'Do Not Abandon Me', a mother and baby are attached by an umbilical cord, but the baby floats away, out of reach. Fragmented, objectified female figures also recur, as caryatids or body parts, while 'Hanging Figure' features a woman's headless, limbless body hanging from a meat hook.

Bourgeois is probably best known for her massive, monumental bronze sculptures of spiders, a constant motif in her work.

Here, a small, unassuming lithograph entitled 'Spider Woman' depicts the head of a woman with hair that forms delicate spiders' legs. The spider imagery is not intended to be threatening, however; instead, it relates to her mother, who she once described as "dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as a spider".

This intimate exhibition reveals how important the act of sewing is for Bourgeois as a way of weaving together the past and the present, and as an act of healing. "I have always had the fear of being separated and abandoned, " she once said. "The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole."