In this series we pay tribute to the art we wish could visit — and hope to see once travel restrictions are lifted. She’s called Maman, and she emerged into the world in 1999, just in time to find her feet and grace the opening of the Tate Modern in the heart of London. Maman. The biggest spider you’ve ever seen at more than nine metres high. The extent to which you are entranced by her bears a direct correlation to whether, when you think “spider”, you think Charlotte in her web or Hobbit-bothering Shelob. For her maker, that most fertile and perhaps febrile artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), spiders represent maternal beings in their care of the young, and in their skillful making and repairing of the family web (that is, they are Charlotte, not Shelob).