EDINBURGH—Louise Bourgeois’s art is a slow burn. She likes to sit back and let you find out what she is saying. Her fabric sculptures, for example, which she stitches together from pieces of her own clothes, sheets, and towels, and then stuffs like rag dolls, look innocuous at first; it is only gradually that you take in the potent ways in which they embody the human condition. But an exhibition now on view at Inverleith House in Edinburgh, Scotland, is very different. Central to this show is a group of recent drawings, the great majority never seen before, and their impact is urgent, direct, and immediate.

Inverleith House is a handsome 18th-century mansion standing in the center of the Royal Botanic Gardens. Founded in 1670, it is one of the two oldest botanical gardens in Britain and claims to hold the second-richest plant collection in the world. In this context, the artist’s meditations on metamorphosis and the great web that links all living things is newly compelling. Bourgeois’s subject matter in this show, titled “Nature Study,” is primarily sex, breast-feeding, and childbirth. In The Arrival, a limbless female torso stitched out of white cloth, with yellow colored fabric for the breasts, and the nipples and lips picked out in pink, becomes a radical variation on the classic iconography of mother and child. The limbless woman has a head at both ends: one between the shoulders and the other identical, but smaller, projecting from her womb. The figure, reduced to pure reproductive functionality by the absence of limbs, represents the moment of birth, of arrival; but also, because of the apparent identity of the two heads, it suggests how at that moment, by a kind of metamorphosis, one person becomes two.

Another sculpture, The Woven Child (2002), uses the metaphor of weaving in the context of childbirth. A tiny newborn baby is suspended not by the single thread of life, but in a net or web—the thread of life woven into the web of life. Webs and weaving are an ancient metaphor, prehistoric even, for life’s connectedness. It is also an ancient art that was once identified as an exclusively female province. We still speak of the distaff side as the female side of a family, but that notion goes beyond any historical division of labor between the sexes. The thread of life is what ties a baby to its mother, and so, over generations, these threads multiply and, metaphorically woven together, they form families, if not communities. Weaving is thus a metaphor for something both much greater than itself and exclusive to the female half of humanity; and, of course, the arachnid, nature’s greatest weaver, is almost Bourgeois’s signature. (Bourgeois’s own family, in fact, were tapestry weavers.)

But the web is also the weaving spider’s trap. Even in birth, we are trapped by life’s imperatives. In The Feeding, a series of 10 drawings, Bourgeois shows a child at a breast, its mouth as wide and demanding as that of a baby bird. These drawings are part of a large group in blood-red gouache, the most striking of which is The Good Breast, a suite of 20 images. In many of them, the wash is gathered in the contour of the breast as though contained by it. Beneath these breasts, but still with greedy mouth open, the baby has become a homunculus, a tiny, full-grown man. In some, this figure is reduced to a head. In others, it is absent entirely but is implied by the flow from the breast. The imperative of sex, they all suggest, is scarcely distinguishable from the imperative of infant hunger. Because of the red wash, too, what flows from the breast is not milk, but blood. In several drawings, its red line is like an umbilical cord. It is as though childbirth, breast-feeding, and sex are all rolled into a single image; the economy of execution matches the compression of the thought.

It would be a mistake to see these drawings as simply a man-woman image, however, or as a picture only of demanding hunger, whether infant or sexual. The artist herself once said of similar works: “I made drawings of breasts pressed against each other; there was a double attitude to be like a mother, and to be liked by a mother . . . the lips kiss like sucking. The whole person becomes a breast that stretches in order to give.” Thus, the breasts she has drawn here are an image of all our needs, male and female, and of giving as well as of taking. All these drawings are red, a color that, for Bourgeois, is loaded with meaning. As she has written: