Tracey Emin

Self-portraiture and the nude run throughout her work, which Emin has described as being about ‘rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone’. Her earliest works refer to her family, childhood and troubled teenage years, growing up in the seaside town of Margate and leaving home at the age of 15. What happened next is explored in a manner that is neither tragic nor sentimental, in drawing, painting, film, photography, sewn appliqué, sculpture, neon and writing, as the vicissitudes of relationships, pregnancies and abortions intersect with her commitment to the formal disciplines of art. Most recently, the artist has experienced her body as a battleground, through illness and ageing, on which she reports with characteristic fearlessness.

The title of Emin’s first solo exhibition, ‘My Major Retrospective 1963–1993’, suggests the artist felt, despite being at the beginning of her career, significant things had already happened. Her obsessive assemblage of personal memorabilia included tiny photographs of her art school paintings that she’d destroyed, a ‘photographic graveyard’ that revealed an admiration for paintings by Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch. She details this ‘emotional suicide’ in Tracey Emin’s CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), among several early video works that give further insight into her formation as an artist, highlighting moments of epiphany through the use of first-person narrative. ‘I realised there was the essence of creativity, that moment of conception’, she says in How It Feels (1996), a pivotal film in which she tells the story of her abortion. ‘The whole being of everything… it had to be about where it was really coming from’. Speaking to camera while walking through the streets of London, she concludes that conceptual art, as an act of reproduction, is inseparable from the artist’s inner life. Developing this connection, the haunting film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998) shows the artist on the pier near Munch’s house, naked and prostrate in the foetal position, the dawn rising over the water as she lifts her head and screams – a guttural response to the great painter’s iconic image.

In 1996, Emin locked herself naked in an enclosed room within a gallery in Stockholm for three and a half weeks to reconcile with her anxieties and guilt around painting, a medium she had abandoned six years prior during her pregnancy when the smell of oil paint and turpentine made her feel sick. The work became Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made. Visitors could look through little fish-eye lenses inserted into the walls of her temporary studio. The entire collection of artworks and objects in the room was then preserved as an installation and later as a single entity. Two years later, in 1998, Emin exhibited My Bed, an uncensored re-presentation of her own bed during a distraught time in her life. The bed has become abstracted from function as it sits on the gallery floor, in conversation with art history and a stage for life events: birth, sleep, sex, depression, illness, death. The accumulation of real objects (slippers, condoms, cigarettes, empty bottles, underwear) on and around the unmade bed builds a portrait of the artist with bracing matter-of-factness, defying convention to exhibit what most people would keep private. The work gained international attention as part of the Turner Prize, entering Emin into public consciousness. Another work that became a byword for her art of disclosure was the sculpture Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963−1995 (1995, destroyed 2004), where the names of all those she had ever shared a bed with – friends, lovers, family and even her two unborn children – were sewn on the inside of a tent, a crawl-space that invites the viewer to reflect on their own moments of intimacy.

Explicitly feminist, Emin’s choice of medium is integral to the story she tells. In hand-embroidered blankets and quilts, traditionally associated with women’s work, she pierces the visual field with words, combining scraps of different material with uneven stitching to spell out statements whose syntax and spelling remain uncorrected. With titles such as Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone’s been there (1997), or Hellter Fucking Skelter (2001), they register the artist’s acute sensitivity to the views of those around her and give a riposte, just as the medium is a riposte to the classification of fine art, for centuries dominated by male artists.

Emin’s use of neon features her recognisable slanted handwriting, elevating fleeting thoughts and feelings as aphorisms: You touch my Soul (2020), I Longed For you (2019) or I don’t Believe in Love but I believe in you (2012). Her formulation of statements in the second person has the effect of placing the viewer squarely in the situation and can encapsulate an entire romance in a pithy phrase, as in I want my time with You (2018), a twenty-metre-wide sentiment illuminated in light that greets passengers at London’s St Pancras Station. A critical part of her art since the 1990s, the neons evoke the seafront lights of Margate, latent with the sense of dusk and faded glamour. Her childhood hometown of Margate is an abiding subject; it resurfaces in large-scale sculptures, where reclaimed wood and found materials are assembled in jagged structures that allude to the beach, pier, huts and tide markers. Margate’s famous theme park ‘Dreamland’ is referred to in several works, among them Self-portrait (2001), which recreates the pleasure ground’s helter-skelter, and It’s Not the Way I want to Die (2005), which recalls the undulating roller coaster in rickety, worn wood, fragile to the point of collapse. Margate is ‘part of me’, Emin says, and while looking back she is now looking to the future with the establishment of TKE Studios, Tracey Karima Emin Studios, subsidised professional artists’ studios with an additional free art school programme called Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR).

Questions of mortality and the centrality of the female reproductive body drive The Mother (2021), one of Emin’s most significant public sculptures. Permanently sited next to the Munch Museum, Oslo, it marks the death of her own mother and pays homage to Munch’s mother, who passed away when he was only six years old, bringing her lifelong admiration for Munch full circle. 15 tonnes of bronze standing nine metres high, this woman with ‘her legs open to the Fjord’ is visible from afar over land and water, a monument to the female figure as a protector without compromising her vulnerability or eroticism. By contrast, Baby Things, Emin’s accurate rendering of children’s tiny lost shoes and clothes in bronze, was installed around Folkestone for the Triennial in 2008. These palm-sized sculptures act as a poignant reminder of Folkestone’s high teenage pregnancy rate, similar to Margate’s. They are intimate tokens that might inadvertently provoke a range of reactions, from fear for those we love most, to the indifference with which we treat a discarded object.

Most recently, Emin’s work has been charged with the seriousness of her health. In 2020, she was diagnosed with bladder cancer and underwent extensive surgery. Now living with a stoma, her paintings of the nude figure have a tempestuous energy. Emin’s graphic line, delicate or vigorous, imparts a sense of urgency; with each abandoned and assertive gesture, she is flaying herself open. Drips and obliterations point to the fluidity of the body, as it fluctuates between joy and suffering on its journey between birth and death.

Dame Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between London, the South of France and Margate, UK. In 2007, Emin represented Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and her installation My Bed (1998) has been included in ‘In Focus’ displays at Tate Britain with Francis Bacon (2015); Tate Liverpool with William Blake (2016); and Turner Contemporary, Margate, alongside JMW Turner (2017). In 2011, Emin was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and in 2012, was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts. In 2024, she was honoured with a Damehood in the King’s Birthday Honours for her services to art.

Emin has exhibited extensively including major exhibitions at Munchmuseet, Oslo (2021); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2020); Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2019); Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France (2017); Leopold Museum, Vienna (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida (2013); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2012); Hayward Gallery, London (2011); Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2009); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2008); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain (2008); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002).