A riot of colour, pattern and words, Hellter Fucking Skelter (2001) affirms Tracey Emin as a master storyteller and savant of the complex muddle of human emotions. With bold cut-out lettering appliquéd onto a composite blanket, each element of which has been painstakingly stitched by hand, Emin presents a series of often tragi-comic anecdotes, proclamations and aphorisms, to form a viscerally honest emotional journey. It is a journey that, in its very form, enfolds the viewer within the dissonant mindscape of the artist’s psyche. Hellter Fucking Skelter attests to what is foundational in Emin’s practice; actualised through textile, drawing, neon or painting, her uncoded, revelatory and diaristic voice inextricably binds words to images, her life to her art.

The first appliquéd blanket Emin made, titled Hotel International, was shown in 1993 in her career-launching solo exhibition ‘My Major Retrospective’, at the original White Cube, in Duke Street, St. James’s, London. Named after the hotel owned and run by her father and mother, its primary fabric component was Emin’s childhood blanket, onto which she stitched fragments from old clothing to record the names of those individuals and places most important to her. Drawing on profoundly intimate memories and using fabrics that carried deep personal meaning, Hotel International initiated a body of work produced over an approximate 15-year period, with Emin’s appliquéd blankets heralding a type of self-portraiture unique to the artist’s ongoing practice: the knotted tapestry of love and desire, loss and grief, pain and rage, vulnerability and resilience.

Hellter Fucking Skelter was first exhibited as part of Emin’s acclaimed solo exhibition ‘You Forgot to Kiss My Soul’ at White Cube Hoxton Square, London, in 2001, where it was showcased alongside the artist’s monumental sculpture, Self-portrait, which recreated in reclaimed timber the helter skelter ride at the theme park ‘Dreamland’ in Margate, the English seaside town where Emin spent her teenage years. Characteristic of Emin’s appliquéd blankets, Hellter Fucking Skelter summons a maelstrom of emotions – searing truths and gnawing paranoias – as if caught mid-thought in the weft and weave of the very fabric of the work. The title of this piece is emblazoned across the top section, against a colourful background of patchwork squares, introducing the clashing panels of material appliquéd to the rest of the surface of the blanket, which in turn carry fragments of thoughts: ‘Burn in hell’; ‘You see, it’s a spirial [sic] which goes down’; ‘You know who you are’. As Emin stated in the press release accompanying the show: ‘It does not matter how good things are – how good life is – it only takes one little knock, to start the never-ending downward spiral, for me every moment of reality is a balance.’

Text has long been foundational to Emin’s practice, used in paintings, monoprints, neon and sculpture, as in her seminal work, Everyone I have ever slept with, 1963–1995 (1995). The words populating Hellter Fucking Skelter run in multiple directions, creating neural connections through an interplay of the letters that form words, that form sentences – the whole resolving into a complex collage of colour and pattern. Emin has reflected on the spontaneity of her process: ‘I’d begin sewing a sentence and then realise I couldn’t get the last word in, and then I’d have to put it in the middle and move everything around, so it was much more like painting’. During a period in her practice when Emin felt painting had forsaken her, the blankets served as a canvas on which she could freely draw and write, playing with colour, shape and composition without the weight of the history of painting to constrain her. Hellter Fucking Skelter demands intimate and prolonged study – akin to a poetic stream of consciousness where one shape, one thought, one feeling replaces another. The resultant ambiguity engenders both unease and liberation, offering the freedom of an almost endless process of rewriting, which, in turn, invites a continual visual editing by the viewer that can become almost cathartic.

Emin’s appliquéd blankets – many of which are now held in major museum collections including Tate, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney – elevate the humble craft of needle and thread to a monumental art form. Uniting masterful craftsmanship with a galvanising authenticity of voice, Hellter Fucking Skelter forms a compelling repository of the artist’s innermost self – disarmingly candid, confrontational and vulnerable, resonant with lived experiences. Hellter Fucking Skelter was included in the artist’s celebrated retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2011. Another of Emin’s appliquéd blankets was recently shown as part of the exhibition ‘Unravel’, at the Barbican in London, which closed in May of this year.