Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin
Tracy Emin at the Lighthouse Gala auction in aid of Terrence Higgins Trust. Photo by Piers Allardyce
Nationality	English

Tracey Emin RA (born 3 July, 1963) is an English artist of Turkish Cypriot origin, one of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists). She has succeeded in equalling, if not surpassing, Damien Hirst among the YBAs in terms of notoriety among the general public. A drunken outburst on a Channel 4 TV discussion, and My Bed — an installation in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed with used condoms and blood-stained underwear — both caused a media furor. Emin's art takes many different forms of expression including needlework and sculpture, drawing, video and installation, photography and painting. There has been an ongoing dispute with former boyfriend, artist Billy Childish, particularly over the Stuckism movement. In March 2007, Emin was chosen to join the Royal Academy of Arts in London as a Royal Academician.

Life

Early life

Sexton Ming, Tracey Emin, Charles Thomson, Billy Childish and Russell Wilkins at the Rochester Adult Education Centre December 11, 1987 to record The Medway Poets LP

Tracey Emin was born in Croydon, but brought up in Margate. She has a twin brother, Paul. Emin's father, an ethnic Turkish Cypriot, was married to a woman other than her mother and divided his time between his two families. He owned the Hotel International in Margate, and, when the business failed, Emin's family suffered a severe decline in their standard of living, circumstances which have featured in a number of works. Around the age of 13 she was raped or "broken in" as she describes the then-current term.

She studied fashion at Medway College of Design (1980–1982), where she met expelled student Billy Childish and was associated with The Medway Poets. Emin and Childish were a couple till 1987 during which time she was the administrator for his small press Hangman Books which specialized in publishing Childish's confessional poetry. In 1984 she studied printing at Maidstone Art College, which she has described as one of the best experiences of her life. In 1995 she was interviewed in the Minky Manky show catalogue by Carl Freedman, who asked her, "Which person do you think has had the greatest influence on your life?" She replied,

Uhmm. .. It's not a person really. It was more a time, going to Maidstone College of Art, hanging around with Billy Childish, living by the River Medway.

In 1987 she moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where she obtained an MA in painting, though she has described this time as a very negative experience. Her influences included Roy Rogers and Trigger; later she destroyed all her paintings from this early period, and for a time studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.

Britartist

In 1993 Emin opened a shop with fellow artist Sarah Lucas, called simply The Shop in Bethnal Green. This sold works by the two of them, including T-shirts and ash trays with Damien Hirst's picture stuck to the bottom. Lucas paid Emin a wage to mind the shop and Emin also made extra money by writing letters to people asking them to invest £20 in her as an artist, one being Jay Jopling, who became her dealer. During this period Emin was also working with the gallerist Joshua Compston.

In 1994 she had her first solo show at the White Cube gallery, a leading contemporary art gallery in London. It was called My Major Retrospective, and was what is now seen as typically autobiographical in her work, consisting of personal photographs, and photos of her (destroyed) early paintings, as well as items which most artists would not consider showing in public, such as a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when he was decapitated in a car crash. This willingness to show details of what would generally be thought of as her private life has become one of Emin's trademarks.

In the mid-1990s she had a relationship with Carl Freedman, who had been an early friend of, and collaborator with, Damien Hirst and who had co-curated seminal Britart shows, such as Modern Medicine and Gambler. In 1994 they toured the US together, driving in a Cadillac from San Francisco to New York, and making stops en route where she gave readings from her autobiographical book Exploration of the Soul to finance the trip. En route they "belly surfed" in San Diego and watched bears in Big Sur.

The couple also spent time by the sea in Whitstable together, using the beach hut, which she uprooted and turned into art in 1999 with the title The Last Thing I Said to You is Don't Leave Me Here, and which was destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire.

Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 by Tracey Emin (1995). An interior view of the work.

In 1995 Freedman curated the show Minky Manky at the South London Gallery. Emin has said,

At that time Sarah (Lucas) was quite famous, but I wasn’t at all. Carl said to me that I should make some big work as he thought the small-scale stuff I was doing at the time wouldn’t stand up well. I was furious. Making that work was my way at getting back at him.

The result was Emin's famous "tent" Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, which was first exhibited in the show. It was a blue tent, appliquéd with the names of everyone she has slept with. These included sexual partners, plus relatives she slept with as a child, her twin brother, and her two aborted children. Although often talked about as a shameless exhibition of her sexual conquests, it was rather a piece about intimacy in a more general sense, although the title invites misinterpretation. The needlework which is integral to this work was used by Emin in a number of her other pieces. This piece was later bought by Charles Saatchi and included in the successful 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of London; it then toured to Berlin and New York. It, too, was destroyed by the fire in Saatchi's east London warehouse, in 2004.

Freedman's interview with her appears in the catalogue. Other featured artists were Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Damien Hirst, Mat Collishaw, Gilbert & George, Critical Décor and Steven Pippin. Emin now describes Freedman as "one of my best friends". He is now her tenant, living in a weaver's cottage at the back of her 450-year-old Huguenot house in Spitalfields, East London.

Fame

Although these early events caused Emin to be well known in art circles, she was largely unknown by the public until she appeared on a Channel 4 television programme in 1997. It was an ostensibly serious debate show about that year's Turner Prize, and Emin appeared completely drunk (she has said this was caused by painkillers she was taking for a broken finger), swearing, insulting the other panel members and saying that she wanted to go home to her mum (she then left).

My Bed by Tracey Emin

Two years later, in 1999, Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize herself and exhibited My Bed at the Tate Gallery. There was considerable media furore about this, particularly as the sheets of the bed were stained yellow, and the floor surrounding it had items from her room such as condoms, a pair of knickers with period stains and other detritus including a pair of slippers. The bed was presented as it had been when she had stayed in it for several days feeling suicidal because of relationship difficulties.

One lady came to the exhibition with cleaning materials and had to be stopped from tidying it up. Two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped onto the bed with bare torsos in order to "improve" the work, which they thought had not gone far enough.

Work

Monoprints

Emin's monoprints are a well documented part of her creative output. These unique drawings represent a diaristic aspect and frequently depict events from the past for example, Poor Love (1999) and From The Week Of Hell '94 (1995), which relate to a traumatic experience after an abortion or other personal events as seen in Fuck You Eddy (1995) and Sad Shower in New York (1995) which are both part of the Tate's collection of Emin's art.

Often they incorporate text as well as image, although some bear only text and others only image. The text appears as the artist's stream of consciousness voice. Some critics have compared Emin's text-only monoprints to ransom notes. The rapid, one-off technique involved in making monoprints is perfectly suited to (apparently) immediate expression, as is Emin's scratchy and informal drawing style. Emin frequently misspells words, deliberately or due to the speed at which she did each drawing. In a 2002 interview with Lynn Barber, Emin said,

It's not cute affectation. If I could spell, then I would spell correctly, but I never bothered to learn. So, rather than be inhibited and say I can't write because I can't spell, I just write and get on with it.

Emin created a key series of monoprints in 1997 with the text Something's Wrong or There Must Be Someting Terebley Wrong With Me [sic] written with spelling mistakes intact in large capital letters alongside "forlorn figures surrounded by space, their outlines fragile on the page. Some are complete bodies, others only female torsos, legs splayed and with odd, spidery flows gushing from their vaginas. They are all accompanied by the legend There's Something Wrong."

Emin's monoprints are rarely displayed alone in exhibitions, they're particularly effective as collective fragments of intense emotional confrontation. Emin has made several works documenting painful moments of sadness and loneliness experienced when travelling to foreign cities for various exhibitions. Emin herself has said,

Being an artist isn't just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it's some kind of communication, a message.

Painting

There is a complex history of Emin's relationship with painting. She has often cited the works of Munch and Schiele as major influences. She had painted in the mid 1980s in an Expressionist style, highly influenced by her then boyfriend Billy Childish. In 1997 art critic Neal Brown, interviewing Tracey for Magma Magazine, asked "How important an Influence was Billy Childish on you?" she replied 'A big influence, a major influence . . . When I first met Billy at 17 I was so nihilistic, I didn’t believe in anything or anyone . . . Billy was the first person I’d met in my life who was doing what they wanted to do . . . For a while I emulated him then was able to branch off and take my own direction. I was really in love with him as well.'

In the late 1980s, Emin completed an MA at the Royal College of Art. She subsequently stopped painting and destroyed all the artworks she had ever done, during a period that she has described as her "emotional suicide" following an abortion. Photos of Emin's destroyed early paintings were part of her first White Cube solo exhibition My Major Retrospective in 1994.

Emin displayed a number of small watercolours in her Turner Prize exhibition in 1999, and also in her New York show Every Part Of Me's Bleeding held that same year, known as the Berlin Watercolour series (1998). These delicate, washed out but colourful watercolours include four portraits of Emin's face and were all painted by Emin in Berlin during 1998. Each unique painting from this series share the same title, Berlin The Last Week in April 1998.

Emin's focus on painting has developed over the past few years, starting with the Purple Virgin (2004) acrylic watercolour series of purple brush strokes depicting her naked open legs, and leading to paintings such as Asleep Alone With Legs Open (2005), the Reincarnation (2005) series and Masturbating (2006) amongst others.

In May 2005, London's Evening Standard newspaper highlighted Emin's return to painting in their preview of her When I Think About Homos exhibition at White Cube. Other works were nude self-portrait drawings. Emin was quoted: "For this show I wanted to show that I can really draw, and I think they are really sexy drawings."

Work for her 2007 show at the Venice Biennale (see below) included large-scale canvases of her legs and vagina. A watercolour series called The Purple Virgins were displayed. There are ten Purple Virgin works in total, six of which were shown at the Biennale. These were accompanied by two canvases of a similar style called How I Think I Feel 1 and 2.

The Venice Biennale was also the first time Emin's Abortion Watercolour series, painted in 1990, had ever been shown in public.

Photography

Emin has produced photographic works throughout her career, including Monument Valley (Grand Scale) (1995-97), I've Got It All (2000) and Sometimes I Feel Beautiful (2000). Emin's most iconic are the two self portraits taken inside her famous beach hut, The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here I (2000) and The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here II (2000). The latter two photographs are a diptych although they are often exhibited and sold separately. They depict a naked Emin on her knees inside her beach hut sculpture The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here (The Hut) (1999). They are part of museum collections including Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom) and have been mass produced as postcards sold in museum shops around the world.

Neon

Emin has also worked with neon lights. One such piece is You Forgot To Kiss My Soul (2001) which consists of those words in blue neon inside a neon heart-shape. Another neon piece is made from the words Is Anal Sex Legal (1998) to complement another Is Legal Sex Anal (1998).

Fabric

Emin frequently works with fabric in the form of appliqués — material (often cut out into lettering) sewn onto other material. She collects fabric from curtains, bed sheets and linen and has done so for most of her life. She keeps such material that holds emotional significance for later use in her work. Many of her appliqués are made on hotel linens, for example. Emin's use of fabric is diverse, from sewing letters onto her grandmother's chair in There's A Lot Of Money In Chairs (1994) to the large appliqué blankets (2001) and smaller scale works such as Always Sorry (2005) and As Always (2005).

On April 13 2007, Emin launched a specially designed flag made out of fabric with the message One Secret Is To Save Everything written in orange-red letters across the banner made up of hand-sewn swimming sperm. Tracey Emin's flag, at 21 feet by 14 feet, will fly above the Jubilee Gardens in the British capital until July 31 2007, with the parliament building and the London Eye as backdrops. Emin called the artwork "a flag made from wishful thinking". The flag was commissioned by the South Bank Centre in London's Waterloo.

In June 2007, on returning from the Venice Biennale, Emin donated a piece of artwork, a handsewn blanket called Star Trek Voyager to be auctioned at Elton John's annual glamorous White Tie & Tiara Ball to raise money for The Elton John AIDS Foundation. The piece of artwork sold for £800, 000.

Found objects

Emin has often made use of found objects in her work from the early use of a cigarette box found in a car crash in which her uncle died. The most well known example is My Bed, where she displayed her bed. Another instance is the removal of her beach hut from Whitstable to be displayed in a gallery. This work was titled The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here (The Hut) (1999). Emin also incorporated stones and rocks which had been thrown through her window in a mixed media piece in her 2005 show. The work consists of a monoprint of herself sitting on a chair with the stones lined up below the drawing in a vitrine.

Installations

Emin has created a number of installation art pieces including Poor Thing (Sarah and Tracey) (2001) which was made up of two hanging frames, hospital gowns, a water bottle and wire.

Films

Emin featured with her then boyfriend, Billy Childish, in Quiet Lives (1982) (11 mins, 16mm, written and directed by Eugene Doyen), once available with Cheated and Room for Rent in A Hangman Triple Bill, also known as The Hangman Trilogy, Hangman Films. Quiet Lives is discussed in an article on Childish's films in No Focus: punk on film (Headpress, 2006)

An autobiographical work is the film, CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), in which Emin narrates her story from childhood in Margate, through her student years, abortions and destruction of her early work.

Top Spot (2004) was Emin's first feature film. Taking its title from a youth centre/disco in Margate (but also a sexual reference), Top Spot, draws heavily on Emin's teenage experiences of growing up in Margate, and features six teenage girls who share their stories. It is also regarded as Emin’s poem to Margate, mixing DV footage and Super 8 film into lyrical montage. The natural beauty of the sea and the sunsets is linked with Margate’s more manmade pleasures, underscored with a selection of 1970s songs that formed the soundtrack to the artist’s own adolescence. It was shot during the summertime in Margate, London, and Egypt. Emin responded by withdrawing the film from general distribution, though it has since been broadcast. A DVD of the film was released in 2004.

Books

• Six Turkish Tales (1987) was published by Hangman books as written by T. K. Emin. Emin's editor for Six Turkish Tales was Billy Childish and Bill Lewis and the cover was illustrated by Billy Childish.
• Exploration Of The Soul (1994) An autobiographical short story which goes from Emin¹s conception to age thirteen. It was a limited edition of 200 copies. Signed on inside with 2 original colour photographs. Book is housed in a hand-sewn white cloth bag with 2 coloured cloth letters "TE" hand sewn (colours such came in green, blue, yellow, pink). In 2003, the book was re-released as an edition of 1000 by Counter Editions (minus the cloth bag/photographs).

File:Emin-Strangeland.jpg

Front cover of Tracey Emin's memoir, Strangeland, published in 2005.

• Details of Depression (2003) Written by Emin using her full name, Tracey Karima Emin: Cyprus/London. Another limited edition, stamped on the back cover, which brings together an ancient Arabic poem and a series of photographs taken around Northern Cyprus. Published by Counter Editions at the same time as the re-issued version of Exploration Of The Soul.
• Strangeland (2005) was Emin's long-awaited memoir. It is divided into three sections, "Motherland", "Fatherland" and "Traceyland". It is written in the first person and conveys an unvarnished look at her life from childhood. Jeanette Winterson wrote, "Her latest writings are painfully honest, and certainly some of it should have been edited out by someone who loves her." Emin's editor for Strangeland was the British novelist Nicholas Blincoe.
• Tracey Emin: Works 1963 - 2006 (2006) was Emin's first in depth monograph. Published by Rizzoli in October 2006 this in depth book covers her work in all media: drawing, sculpture, film, photography, and writing. The extensive text is based on a long friendship and hundreds of hours of discussion between Emin and Carl Freedman.

Sculpture

In February 2005, Emin's first public artwork, a bronze sculpture, went on display outside the Oratory, adjacent to Liverpool Cathedral. It consists of a small bird perched on a tall bronze pole, and is designed so that the bird seems to disappear when viewed from the front. It was commissioned by the BBC.

Other sculptures have included Death Mask (2002) which is a bronze cast of her own head. Emin loaned this work to the National Portrait Gallery in 2005,

The death mask, which enjoyed a popular revival in the nineteenth century, was a method for preserving the final expression and physiognomy of the famous or infamous, largely based on the belief that facial features and proportion could explain personal attributes such as genius or criminality. These likenesses were often produced and distributed in multiples as plaster casts could be taken from a bronze original.

In an ironic reference to the much discussed autobiographical nature of her practice which has dominated critical reception of her work, Emin has cast her own death mask during her life-time creating a contemporary portrait with an historic allusion through her use of this lost tradition.

Death Masks were most usually made of male subjects. The red appliqué fabric on which Emin's bronze head is placed refers to the frequent use of quilting and embroidery in her work, associated with the domestic sphere of women, which challenges masculine frameworks of history and art history. Emin, whose work is often based on images of herself, once commented "It is like they have seen my art by seeing me". In this work she offers herself in perpetuity as an enclosed specimen or museum display, literally transforming herself into an object for the scrutiny of generations to come.

Working methods

In common with many YBAs, including Damien Hirst, Emin employs assistants for fabrication purposes, for example sewing the lettering onto her appliquéd pieces. She has commented on the pointlessness of carrying out such time-consuming work in person.

Work becomes art when it is defined as such by her. A poster she photocopied and put up around her home when her cat Docket went missing became an object collected by people, but was excluded by her from her canon. Similarly in 2002, Emin was commissioned to collaborate with children on an artwork in a primary school in North London. Pupils made the piece with her in Emin's style of sewing cut out letters onto a large piece of material. In 2004, the school enquired if Emin would sign the work so that the school could sell it as an original to raise funds. Emin refused and demanded the return of the tapestry, saying that it was not a piece of her art.

Momart fire

Main article: Momart

On 24 May, 2004, a fire in a Momart storage warehouse in East London destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including Emin's famous tent with appliquéd letters, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 ("The Tent") (1995) and The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here ("The Hut") (1999), Emin's blue wooden beach hut that she bought with fellow artist Sarah Lucas and shared with her boyfriend of the time, the gallerist Carl Freedman. Emin spoke out angrily against the general public lack of sympathy, and even amusement, at the loss of the artworks in the fire. However, she also put the loss in perspective, commenting:

I'm also upset about those people whose wedding got bombed last week [in Iraq], and people being dug out from under 400ft of mud in the Dominican Republic.

Venice Biennale (2007)

Main article: Venice Biennale

In August 2006, the British Council announced that they had chosen Emin to produce a show of new and past works for the British Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Emin will be the second woman to produce a solo show for the UK at the Biennale, following Rachel Whiteread in 1997. In a BBC interview, Andrea Rose, the commissioner for the British Pavilion, said the exhibition would allow Emin's work to be viewed "in an international context and at a distance from the YBA generation with which she came to prominence."

Emin has chosen the title Borrowed Light for the in-depth exhibition of her work which will open to the public on 10 June 2007. The artist has produced new work especially for the British Pavilion, using a wide variety of media - from needlework, photography and video to drawing, painting, sculpture and neon. A promotional British Council flyer includes an image of a previously unseen monoprint for the exhibition called Fat Minge (1994) which will be included in the show whilst the Telegraph newspaper featured a photo of a new purple neon Legs I (2007) which will be on display (directly inspired by Emin's 2004 purple watercolour Purple Virgin series. Emin herself summed up her Biennale exhibition work as,

Pretty and hard-core

Emin was interviewed about the Venice Biennale in her East London studio by the BBC's Kirsty Wark; this was broadcast on BBC Four television channel in November 2006. Emin showed Wark some work-in-progress, which included large-scale canvases with paintings of Emin's legs and vagina. Starting with the Purple Virgin (2004) acrylic watercolour series with their strong purple brush strokes depicting Emin's naked open legs, leading to Emin's paintings in 2005-6 such as Asleep Alone With Legs Open (2005), the Reincarnation (2005) series and Masturbating (2006) amongst others, these works are a significant new development in her artistic output.

In an interview with Lynn Barber published in The Observer newspaper the week before the launch of Emin's biennale show, the artist said of her work,

It's the most feminine work I've ever made.

Andrea Rose, the British Pavilion commissioner, added to this commenting on the art Emin has produced, 'It's remarkably ladylike. There is no ladette work - no toilet with a poo in it - and actually it is very mature I think, quite lovely. She is much more interested in formal values than people might expect, and it shows in this exhibition. It's been revelatory working with her. Tracey's reputation for doing shows and hanging them is not good, but she's been a dream to work with. What it shows is that she's moved a long way away from the YBAs. She's quite a lady actually!'

Royal Academician (2007)

On 29 March 2007, Tracey Emin was made Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts. Emin became a member of the Royal Academy joining an elite group of artists including David Hockney, Peter Blake, Anthony Caro and Alison Wilding. This entitles Emin to exhibit up to six works in the annual summer exhibition.

Emin has a long history of exhibiting her art at the Royal Academy, having been invited to include works at their Summer Exhibitions in 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004 and 2001. For 2004's Summer Exhibition, Emin was chosen by fellow artist David Hockney to submit a monoprint about her abortion called Ripped Up (1995) as that year's theme celebrated the art of drawing as part of the creative process. Emin's art was first included at the Royal Academy as part of the Sensation exhibition in 1997.

Stuckism

Main article: Stuckism

Emin's relationship with the artist and musician Billy Childish led to the name of the Stuckism movement in 1999. Childish, who had mocked Emin's new affiliation to conceptualism in the early '90s, was told by Emin, "Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! – Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!" (that is, stuck in the past for not accepting the YBA approach to art). He recorded the incident in the poem, "Poem for a Pissed Off Wife" published in "Big Hart and Balls" Hangman Books 1994, from which Charles Thomson, who knew them both, later coined the term Stuckism.

Emin and Childish had remained on friendly terms up until 1999, but the activities of the Stuckist group offended her and caused a lasting rift with Childish. In a 2003 interview, she was asked about the Stuckists:

I don't like it at all," she spat. "I don't really want to talk about it. If your wife was stalked and hounded through the media by someone she'd had a relationship with when she was 18, would you like it? That's what happened to me. I don't find it funny, I find it a bit sick, and I find it very cruel, and I just wish people would get on with their own lives and let me get on with mine.

Childish left The Stuckist movement in 2001.

See also

• Installation art
• Conceptual art

Further reading

• Tracey Emin, Borrowed Light: the British Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2007 (London: British Council, 2007) ISBN 0863555896

• Neal Brown, Tracey Emin (Tate's Modern Artists Series) (London: Tate, 2006) ISBN 1854375423

• Tracey Emin, Tracey Emin: Works 1963 - 2006 (London: Rizzoli, 2006) ISBN 0847828778

• Tracey Emin, Strangeland (London: Scepter, 2005) ISBN 0340769440

• Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend eds., The Art of Tracey Emin (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002) ISBN 0500283850

• Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) ISBN 0816645264

External links

• Tracey Emin at White Cube
• Tracey Emin at Lehmann Maupin Gallery
• Tracy Emin at the Saatchi Gallery, London
• Video interview with the artist on Tate Online
• Interview with young people on the Tate website
• Emin's page at the Graduate School
• Interview on The Guardian Website on her debut film Top Spot
• Interview in The Observer about Margate
• Tracey Emin interviewed in The Guardian about Momart Fire
• h2g2 article on Tracy Emin
• Emin's Bed Lego sculpture by the Little Artists
• Tracey Emin interviewed by Ginny Dougary (2004)
• Listen online: Tracey Emin Interviewed On BBC Radio 4
• Tracey Emin Interviewed in 1997 by Neal Brown: Billy Childish "A Major Influence"
• Interactive video interview with Tracey Emin and interactive exploration of her work at the Tate Gallery.