Tracey Emin | MTSU Foundations

Tracey Emin is a British artist born July 3, 1963, in Croydon, United Kingdom. Her own life and emotions are the subject of her multimedia works, including installation, photography, drawing, video, painting, sculpture, neon text, and even needlework. Her work is often provocative and personal because it represents her experiences. She studied printing at Maidstone College of Art in 1986. In 1989, she earned her masters in painting at the Royal College of Art in London, where she is now a Professor of Drawing. She is one of two female professors the College has employed since opening in 1768. After earning her masters, Emin went through an emotional time where she had two abortions and destroyed all the work she had made at the Royal College. Emin is a member of the Young British Artists who exhibited together in London in the ’80s-90s and is known for their autobiographical installations.

In 1999, Emin was nominated for a Turner Prize and although she did not win she received a lot of attention for her work My Bed (1998). It was a perfect example of her intimate work, an installation of the artist’s bed covered with cigarettes, bottles, condoms, and stains representing days spent depressed in bed. Another example of her very personal work is Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1963-95), a small tent installation appliqued with a list of 102 names of people the artist had sex with or literally slept next to in her life, notably including her brother, grandmother and two aborted babies. Emin named Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele as her inspirations. She represents a self-confessing form of expressionism and has inspired women and artists around the world to be honest.

“There should be something revelatory about art. It should be totally creative and open doors for new thoughts and experiences.” -Tracey Emin

Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995)

Works Cited:

https://www.artsy.net/artist/tracey-emin

https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/tracey-emin-my-bed-1998-tate-britain/

http://www.artnet.com/artists/tracey-emin/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tracey-Emin

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/emin-tracey/artworks/

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.”