TRACES: Tracey Emin

Today is the occasion to bear in mind Tracey Emin (3/7/1963- ) an English artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the “enfant terrible” of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Efi Michalarou

Tracey Emin and her twin brother, Paul, were born to an unwed mother. Their father, who was married to someone other than their mother, was a Turkish Cypriot. Emin grew up in the seaside resort town of Margate.  Emin was raped at the age of 13 while living in Margate, citing assaults in the area as “what happened to a lot of girls”.  Her work has been analysed within the context of early adolescent and childhood abuse, as well as sexual assault. She dropped out of school and moved to London at 15. Two years later she attended Medway College of Design (now part of the University for the Creative Arts), Rochester, where she studied fashion. She was accepted without a secondary-school certificate at nearby Maidstone College of Art (also now part of UCA) and earned a fine-arts degree in 1986. Thereafter she obtained a master’s degree in painting (1989) from the Royal College of Art in London. There she met expelled student Billy Childish and was associated with The Medway Poets. Emin and Childish were a couple until 1987, during which time she was the administrator for his small press, “Hangman Books”, which published Childish’s confessional poetry.[ In 1987, Emin moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where in 1989 she obtained an MA in painting. After graduation, she had two traumatic abortions and those experiences led her to destroy all the art she had produced in graduate school and later described the period as “emotional suicide”.[32][33] Her influences included Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, and for a time she studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. One of the paintings that survives from her time at Royal College of Art is Friendship, which is in the Royal College of Art Collection. Additionally, a series of photographs from her early work that were not destroyed were displayed as part of My Major Retrospective. In 1993, in the former London borough of Bethnal Green, Emin and fellow artist Lucas opened a store where they sold their own handmade items. One of Emin’s earliest exhibitions took place in 1993–94 at the influential White Cube gallery on Duke Street (1993–2002). That show, ironically titled “My Major Retrospective” gave a hint of things to come. It displayed personally significant artifacts from Emin’s life, such as a hospital bracelet and personal correspondence, in addition to a quilt on which she had stitched the names of family members and notes to them. In 1994 Emin undertook a U.S. tour of performance art for which, sitting in her grandmother’s chair, she read from “Exploration of the Soul,” a handwritten autobiographical book (subsequently published in 2003) chiefly about her childhood. For a mostly YBA group show called “Minky Manky” (1995) at South London Gallery, she produced “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995” (1995; now destroyed), a tent embroidered with the names of everyone she had (literally) slept with, including her twin brother, her mother, and her two aborted fetuses, as well as assorted lovers. In 1999 she became a finalist for the Turner Prize with the installation “My Bed” (1998), which displayed not only the artist’s actual bed but also rumpled bedclothes and what one critic called “uncomfortably personal debris” including soiled underwear, empty liquor bottles, and used condoms. That work, like many others made by YBAs, was purchased by advertising mogul and art collector Charles Saatchi, and it was among some 200 works of art he would donate to the creation of the Museum of Contemporary Art London in 2012. Throughout the following decade, Emin explored a variety of media. She represented Great Britain in 2007 at the Venice Biennale with the show “Borrowed Light” which included some neon pieces and embroidery as well as a series of watercolors and sculptures. She joined the ranks of Zaha Hadid, Anish Kapoor, David Hockney, and many others when she was elected a Royal Academician  that same year. In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy; with Fiona Rae, she is one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768. In addition, Emin was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2013.