sewn appliqués | MTSU Foundations

Tracey Emin is a famous British artist who is well known for her deeply emotional art that explores her traumas, shame, sexuality, love, and her childhood. As her art mostly is comprised of short highly emotional glimpses into her experience of her experience as a woman, many critics describe her works as “autobiographical and confessional”. The reoccurring themes of her work helped her gain the title of the “Enfant Terrible of the Young British Artists movement”. She explores these themes in a variety of different mediums such as sculpture, drawings, paintings, and, sewn appliqués, and neon signs. Many of these different mediums are used to explore different ideas, such as her neon signs often address her thoughts on love, while her paintings and drawings are primarily focused on her vulnerability though sexuality.

In one of Emin’s arguably most well know works, titled “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995“, she lists from early childhood to the current year in which she had created the piece, everyone she had ever slept with, she included her family, her friends, and her sexual partners. She explained “Some I’d had a shag with in bed or against a wall some I had just slept with, like my grandma. I used to lay in her bed and hold her hand. We used to listen to the radio together and nod off to sleep. You don’t do that with someone you don’t love and don’t care about.” She used sewn appliqué pieces, that to some extent look almost childlike, possibly meaning to show that sleeping with someone used to mean something entirely different and innocent.

*Mum & Dad*
2017
Acrylic and pencil on canvas

*It was all too Much*
2018
Acrylic on canvas

In these selections from her exhibit, A Fortnight of Tears, Emin explores her pain from her traumatic childhood, rape, abortions, and lost love and other tragic themes of the female experience. For Emin, much of this exhibit was about addressing her shame, and conquering it, in an interview she stated “I’ve killed my shame, I’ve hung it on the walls.”

Her variety in mediums help the viewer to understand the different kinds of pain she felt from different experiences. In “Mum & Dad” and “It was all too Much” she uses line and color to show the mental damage of her childhood and sexual past. In both pieces we can see how Emin uses erratic brushstrokes to convey how the mental trauma has manifested in her life and how, but in “Mum & Dad” we also see one straight line in the center, that clearly represents the harsh division in her parents relationship. I believe she chose a similar medium for both of these paintings because she feels a similar type of primal pain, as opposed to the neon used in “longed for you” which seems to be more of a commentary on beautiful pain. In an interview she once said, “For me, aggression, sex and beauty go together. Much of my work has been about memory, for example, but memories of violence and pain. Nowadays if I make a drawing I’m trying to draw love, but love isn’t always gentle. 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.”