When Tracey Emin makes an artistic statement she shows you her unmade bed or a tent with the appliqued names of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. It's confessional art at its most literal, even banal.

Louise Bourgeois was a confessional artist too, but in her work memory and material are synthesised into something more mysterious. How else to explain her spider sculptures, the creepy oversize specimens to which she gave the name Maman (Mother)?

Bourgeois, who died in 2010 at age 98, lived through the disasters and triumphs of the 20th century and every -ism the art world could invent. Yet in her work she stayed true to a personal vision that drew on a fund of memories, relationships and sensations.

Her studio assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, says her art-making was a form of autobiography.

"But it's the diary of her emotional life which she has put into three-dimensional form, or two-dimensional form," he says. "Most of that comes from her relationships with other people, what she wants, how someone makes her feel . . . She was a very anxious person, she had a lifelong fear of abandonment."

As she said herself: "The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering."

That could make an exhibition of Bourgeois's work sound like a roomful of misery. There is no doubt that her work can be tough and provocative: her Cell installations - encaged arrangements of found objects - could refer to a prison of pain as much as to the building blocks of life.

But Bourgeois also could be sexy and wickedly funny. The famous portrait of her by Robert Mapplethorpe shows her cradling an oversize dildo sculpture that she called Fillette (Girl).

One of Bourgeois's spider sculptures will be in residence at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Victoria from this month as part of an exhibition of work from the last 15 years of her life. Among the late works are fabric sculptures - heads and human figures like soft toys, but always with a Bourgeois twist - that she fashioned from old pieces of her clothing.

The fabric sculptures and spiders, Gorovoy says, represent a return in Bourgeois's work to the mother figure and memories that go back to early childhood. It helps to know that the Bourgeois family, when Louise was a young girl growing up in France, was in the business of antique tapestries. She would remember drawing designs for tapestry repairs.

Her mother was warm and affectionate, her father a tyrant. The great trauma of her childhood was the discovery of her father's affair with her English governess, a betrayal whose sting could not be removed. It found its most potent expression in her 1974 sculpture The Destruction of the Father, a tableau of what appears to be an army of invading breasts.

In the arachnid form of Maman - a sculpture that has spun a web around the world from London to Doha and Boston - Bourgeois identified qualities of maternal love. The spider is a protector and also a weaver, recalling Bourgeois's childhood in the tapestry shop. "It's the spinning and the weaving," says Jason Smith, director of the Heide museum. "The spider is a creature of utter self-determination. I think that's what appealed to Louise . . . Spiders have to spin their own web; that is what she did."

Heide is also holding a second exhibition that will show her influence on Australian art and artists. This is due, in no small part, to the visionary collection-building of James Mollison, inaugural director of the National Gallery of Australia (to 1990) and director of the National Gallery of Victoria (1990-95). Two years before a 1982 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art that launched Bourgeois before a wide public, Mollison bought her enigmatic 1941-48 sculpture C.O.Y.O.T.E. for the Canberra collection. The piece was originally called The Blind Leading the Blind and painted red and black; in 1979 Bourgeois repainted it in flesh tones and gave it the acronym for an organisation of sex workers ("Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics").

When Mollison joined the NGV he acquired for that gallery Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands), 1990-93, and organised the first major Australian exhibition of Bourgeois's work in 1995.

In a catalogue essay for the Heide show, Julie Ewington writes that the 1995 exhibition made Bourgeois a permanent fixture in the imagination of Australian artists. Her influence was both direct and subtle. For example, Janet Burchill's Following the Blind Leading the Blind (1997) directly references Bourgeois's C.O.Y.O.T.E. Patricia Piccinini - whose sculptures can have a similar biomorphic weirdness to some of those by Bourgeois - recalls encountering the elder artist's work in New York and feeling an "irrepressible, gooey strangeness".

Del Kathryn Barton says Bourgeois gave her the courage to pursue an "unashamed emotionality" in her work. Brent Harris, the only male artist in the exhibition, says Bourgeois's example "empowered me to revisit troubled emotions" in his drawing and painting. Joy Hester, who died in 1960 and would not have known Bourgeois's work, is included for her exploration of female subjectivity.

Smith says the Australians responded to Bourgeois's raw honesty about emotion, sex and desire. "She simply did not resile from the emotional states that drove all of her actions," he says. "I think that was liberating for artists; it was certainly liberating for a generation of women artists in Australia, who could see that there was an incredible, sometimes very quiet power . . . Sometimes it's like a sledgehammer. People found it liberating that an artist could work across media and across subjects."

Bourgeois, who had moved to New York in the 1940s with her American husband, lived in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan. After the success of her 1982 MoMA exhibition, she opened a studio space in Brooklyn. Gorovoy became her studio assistant and was responsible for handling the organisation around her exhibitions.

In the last 15 years of her life, Bourgeois started to mine the contents of her wardrobe for what would be become her three-dimensional fabric sculptures and fabric "drawings".

The soft fabric was an easier material for Bourgeois, then in her 80s, to manipulate, although some of the fine stitching was done by an assistant. The works from this period include Couple IV (1997), a soft sculpture of two figures in an embrace, one of them with a prosthetic leg. In Femme Maison (2001), the shape of a female torso is surmounted by a little house.

In the series of fabric drawings Dawn and The Waiting Hours, pieces of coloured material are patchworked together in geometric shapes. "It's like she is threading together memories and emotions and trying to figure out why she is anxious or unhappy, trying to trace it back to its cause," Gorovoy says.

Old age brought its difficulties: Bourgeois suffered from arthritis and insomnia, Gorovoy says: she sometimes wouldn't sleep for days, and then crash for 24 hours.

"She needed to work every day. But if she wasn't feeling great, she would make drawings. If she had energy, she would be working with three dimensions. That would really determine the course of the day," he says.

In her 90s, Bourgeois could be playful, coquettish, flirtatious. "And she could be like a baby if she didn't get her own way or things weren't working out," Gorovoy says. She loved to entertain would host a salon on Sundays. Smith, when he was working on the 1995 NGV exhibition, recalls visiting Bourgeois in Chelsea and her making a "eccentric salad" of boiled eggs, beetroot and beans.

"She was engaging but she kept a certain distance," Smith says. "And she was quiet: she let the visit unfold so she could get my measure as much as I could get hers."

Bourgeois worked until the day she died, transforming her suffering into art. Did this funny, wise but anxious woman find peace after 98 years? Gorovoy thinks so.

"She wasn't totally a happy camper," he says. "I think she was able to calm down . . . but we're talking about degrees. She had a certain rhythm: she would go to the studio, I would come to the house. She had a baseline of security which was really important for her. That was my role, to keep things on an even keel: no up and down, no drama, no rages."