Tracey Emin Overview

"I really cannot carry on living with all that stuff stuck inside me," Emin once said, and proceeded to dredge up her tainted, passionate past and dish it out raw. The public at large has seen Emin grow up, in a... [more]

"I really cannot carry on living with all that stuff stuck inside me," Emin once said, and proceeded to dredge up her tainted, passionate past and dish it out raw. The public at large has seen Emin grow up, in a fashion. She's been publicly processing her life since at least 1993, the time of her first exhibitions at Hotel Carlton Palace in Paris and galleries around Europe and in New York. Emin has shared everything from used tampons and pregnancy test kits to soiled sheets and day-old underwear -- and was rewarded for it with a spot on the 1999 short list for the prestigious Turner Prize. (Steve McQueen came up the winner.) Along with found (around-the-flat) objects, she has also embroidered tapestries with text and images of what she calls a "psyco" [sic] life, including her rape at 13 and the many sexual partners she experienced as a teenager. "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995," Emin's contribution to the famed "Sensation" show, consists of a mattress inside a tent. Emin appliquéd the names of all her past lovers on flowery backgrounds against the walls of the tent which is illuminated, shrine-like, by a light from within. Emin has even gone so far as to use a fragment of her aborted fetus in one piece. She delivers this confessional art, dubbed "neurotic art," with a sense of humor and boldness that causes it to hover in the realm of the transformative. As she nears the end of her 30s and moves into an apparently happy relationship with fellow artist Mat Collishaw, Emin has been questioned about her ability to maintain her edge. Even her more outrageous work has received mixed critical acclaim. Some critics have accused it of narcissism and solipsism while others, like Feed's Stefanie Syman, have admired Emin for "mak[ing] you wonder at the chemistry whereby ordinary things become extraordinary, or rather how you make ordinary things say extraordinary things. In displaying her own trash, somehow, she makes celebrity culture run backwards." [show less]