Tracey Emin
Using experiences from her own life, Tracey Emin often reveals painful situations with brutal honesty and poetic humour. The personal expands to the universal in the way Emin takes a feeling about her life and forms it into a genuine expression of a human emotion.
Tracey Emin is almost always portrayed as a Diana-esque femme tragique. It's rare to get a glimpse of the happy, successful, confident person she's become. I've Got It All is a transient crowning glory: a shameless, two-fingers up to her critics. Emin's triumphed over all, and has money up the whazoo to boot!
Craft-based, usually laboriously incorporating sewing and text, each piece is an intimate home-made offering of herself. Her works operate like souvenirs, celebratory memoirs of the occasion of her life.
Every time Tracey Emin appears in newspapers and on the telly, she is essentially making the 'non-art' world compliant participators in her practise. Emin also tells her story through drawings, sculptures and installations.
Influenced by talk-show television and tell-all exclusives, Tracey Emin uses mass-media strategies in a folkloristic tradition of storytelling. Playing both subject and therapist, she reveals and edits her autobiography. Tracy Emin has become a living artwork, achieving celebrity status just for being herself.
In 1974, Joseph Beuys did a performance called I Love America, and America Loves Me where he lived in a gallery with a wild coyote for seven days as a symbolic act of reconciliation with nature. In 1996, Tracey Emin lived in a locked room in a gallery for fourteen days, with nothing but a lot of empty canvases and art materials, in an attempt to reconcile herself with paintings. Viewed through a series of wide-angle lenses embedded in the walls, Emin could be watched, stark naked, shaking off her painting demons. Starting by making images like the artists she really admired (i.e. Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Yves Klein), Emin's two-week art-therapy session resulted in a massive outpouring of autobiographical images, and the discovery of a style all her own. The room was extracted in its entirety, and now exists as an installation work.
Emin is a storyteller whose subject matter comes from Emin’s own rich life. Through the poetry of her honest retelling of unique and intimate life-events Emin establishes a generous dialogue between the viewer and the artist. Emin exposes herself, her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in an incredibly direct manner. Often tragic and frequently humorous, it is as if by telling her story and weaving it into the fiction of her art she somehow transforms it.
