The Materials and Appropriation of Tracey Emin

Tracey Karima Emin or better known as Tracey Emin was originally born in London in 1963, she was brought up in Margate with her twin brother Paul by their mother from a very early age (hence the well known nickname, ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’). From a very early age Emin was subjected to sexual abuse, which in turn has been the subject for a substantial amount of her work including sexual nature. Emin attended the Royal College of Art in which she gained an MA in painting.

But Emin has described this period in her life as a negative experience, as she felt as though the other students attending the college were far too posh, thus creating an alienated experience. “Emin has described feeling conspicuously different and alienated from other students. ” (Brown, 2006, page 16) Emin is also a member of the Young British Artists group (YBAs) and it is also wildly known that Emin came up with the name for the Stuckism movement in which her boyfriend at the time Billy Childish was a member of.

It is believed that the name for this movement came about by Emin claiming that his oeuvre was ‘stuck’. "Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! – Stuck! Stuck! Stuck! (That is, stuck in the past for not accepting the YBA approach to art). ” So who is Tracey Emin? Is she a painter, print maker, photographer, instalaitionist, film maker, sculptor or writer? I would actually consider Tracey Emin to be all of these professions, including much more, due to the wide variety of her skills.

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Her work consists of a number of techniques that we, as the viewer, have seen since she has been in the public eye from the early 1990’s. The range of materials Emin has used (and still uses to this very day) is very vast indeed. There are very few artists out there in the world who use such an amount. Instead of just complying with the normal standard of art and just subjecting herself to a limited supply of materials, but then again most contemporary artists tend to think outside the box and do not want to conform to normality.

The main piece of Oeuvre that I was to talk analyse is Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 1995, otherwise known as ‘The Tent’ (fig 1 and 2). This was originally shown at the South London Gallery as part of a group show called ‘Minky Manky’, which substantionaly became the turning point in Emins career. In regards to the materials Emin has used, the overall body of this piece is actually a shop brought tent (ready made object), which is the shape of a hexagon. It makes me wonder how Emin came about in deciding that this was the tent to use.

I can just imagine Emin visiting a substantial number of retail shops searching for ‘the right tent’. Maybe this tent in particular just had that ‘ju ne se qua’ about it that drew Emin towards using it. She has also introduced more forms of materials such as an old mattress that she has placed inside of the tent with the text ‘with myself, always myself, never forgetting ‘appliqued on the bottom of the mattress in the centre. Inside of this small tent Emin has listed all the names of everyone that she has ever slept with during the time period in the title, 102 in fact.

Her use of re- appropriating in regards to the appliques method which also includes the use of materials also used in this piece is something that I will be looking into a little later on. I find this really intriguing, as the use of appliques is quite an old fashioned way of making art these days. For centuries women all over the world had used this technique as a simple way of passing the time, as it was not even considered art in itself, and yet here we have a Young British Artist using this old fashioned method as part of her core work.

Emin has even used this very same method in other pieces of her work including ‘Hate and Power can be a Terrible Thing 2004’. Now at first I thought this was an arbitrary shameless exhibition of her past sexual conquests. But when I took the time to look at the pictures of ‘The Tent’ (As it would now be impossible to view this in any art gallery, as it was destroyed in an unfortunate fire at the Saatchi Gallery in 2004), I was able to see that included in those names are members of her family, including her twin brother and also her unborn children i. e. , foetus 1 and 2.

As I have already mentioned, that this could have been portrayed as an exhibition of past sexual conquests, Emin claims herself that all of the people she has named within the tent are in fact about intimacy and purely nothing sexual. “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 care about”. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Everyone_I_Have_Ever_Slept_With_1963%E2%80%931995 23/10/10

I know from reading about Tracey Emin regarding this piece that the members of the audience that went to view this piece, have said that when they emerged from he tent they were thinking about their own past lives, including the people they have cared about “Some observers found the action of climbing inside the tent to read the names strangely intimate. This just goes to show that she has deliberately played with our minds to make us instantly think about what she wants us to think about, and that is those we care a great deal about.

As Emin has said herself, it’s all about the communication. She has more or less re-appropriated this method and made it her own. Instead of sewing the regular ideals of something traditional such as a quilt or clothes in that matter, that would usually be commissioned using this historical method, she has re-invented this technique and used it for something to express her past sexual experiences through the representations of her own body, not necessarily physically for the viewer to see, but through the senses in ways that Emin portrays by symbolising the names of her past.

Could Emin be playing with the Signs and Codes of ‘The Tent’? I honestly believe that she could well be. I feel that she is trying to tell us through When it comes to discussing such signs and codes Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) believed that the signs and codes where a way in which the artists and audience could communicate. “Saussure believed that all of culture is made up of signs. That is to say, social life is characterised by the circulation and exchange of forms to which convention has been given meaning. A sign for Saussure is simply any device through which human beings communicate to each other”. Ward, 2003, page 83) However all of these names have been Appliqued, are those of family, friends and boyfriends (One of which is her former boyfriend Billy Childish). When I think about the signs and codes Emin has used, I start to wonder, did she do this on purpose? Is she forcing me as a member of the audience to subconsciously think about all of the people that I have ever cared about in my own life? As Emin has stated in the quote above that this piece is about intimacy. I believe that Emin has truly cared about all of these names at some point in her own life, as the time and effort she has taken to create this.

The use of appliques, which is the term for sewing fabric directly on top of more fabric, of which she has used to attach all of the 102 names inside. This is in itself is a time consuming process and I believe that this is truly a sign to show that she has put as much effort into creating this Oeuvre as much as she did with the relationships in her life. Tracey Emin also uses representations of the body in a number of her drawings and monoprints. Here she uses the method of monprint as a way of capturing her thoughts and ideas. Usually these thoughts are again to do with her turbulent past.

When you look at her drawings such as Suffer Love II, 2009 (fig 3) in which you can only see of what is presumably Emins own body is that of two naked legs erotically spread open wearing high heel shoes , you can see who her influences are e. g. Egon Shiele (fig 4). “Schiele’s eroticism and emphasis on childhood sexuality took this interest to a moral extreme. His depictions of childhood sexuality are a dangerous theme, and one shared by Emin”. (Brown, 2006, page 29) Here you can see that she is expressing her thoughts entirely just by a simple yet effective drawing.

Both of the artist’s drawings are very alike in terms of the irrational lines that express how they must have been feeling at the time they were produced. Although Emins work is mostly of sexual emotions, her work does engage the audience. “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. ” http://www. saatchi-gallery. co. uk/artists/tracey_emin. htm 20/10/2010 Although some of her work can be quite controversial.

Everybody at some point over the years has heard of Tracey Emin either through television or from reading newspapers and magazines, regarding her radical use of her exploration of her own body and personal past life. Her work is very autobiographical, in which her main source of study is herself, and about her past experiences in which she obviously wants to share with us. I would say that in that situation she must either be very naive or just completely an exhibitionist. At first I was unsure as to why I should write my essay on Tracey Emin, but after researching her, I have come to understand the ‘method in her madness’ so to speak.

The way in which your mind starts to think in overdrive in how and why she creates such pieces of oeuvre and why she mostly only concentrates on certain parts of her past. I feel that all she is trying to achieve is basically instead of writing a book on her past life, she is giving us the visual experience instead, as sometime books can literally be boring with their little pictures and overrated text, but Emin takes away the boring text and replaces them with bold, brass exploiting words that make you want to read and want to learn more about her.

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