Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous.
Emin’s work has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. By re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques – or ‘women’s work’ – for radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the ‘personal as political’. In Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, Emin used the process of appliqué to inscribe the names of lovers, friends and family within a small tent, into which the viewer had to crawl inside, becoming both voyeur and confidante. Her interest in the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele particularly inform Emin’s paintings, monoprints and drawings, which explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.
Tracey Emin (b.1963) has used neon as a consistent medium since the early 1990s, juxtaposing simple and intimate handwritten text with a medium that traditionally serves more commercial or urban utilitarian purposes. Pastel coloured light tubes, bent to mimic the artist's handwriting, spell out illuminated thoughts and feelings: passions, love declarations, disappointments and fears, or simply insults. And the subject is always Emin herself: we read her disappointments, her desires, her experiences, her infatuation and heranger - her neon works are her written confession.
Emin is an artist who has placed her own life at the centre of her art. This practice makes her not only someone whose work can be uncannily touching - through it's frankness and self-denial - but it makes her a cultural phenomenon of contemporary society, where voyeurism and self-invention play an essential part.
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