Tracey Emin
What fascinates me about the seemingly 'childish' drawings of artist Tracey Emin, is just how charged they are with human experience and emotional content. The materiality of the drawings, particularity in mono-prints, is the relinquish of control that allows for moments of chance outcomes to occur, which mirrors the artists life. The quality of line also suggests a fragility that the content often hints too. The text that often accompany the images are direct and in your face, screaming out in desperation, sometimes very private and personal messages that can make the viewer feel uncomfortable, as if they are peering into something they are not meant to see.
The men above are pictured just as heads, possibility because it was mainly the faces of the men that stuck in the artists mind. This in turn suggests a traumatic event, or situation the artist is describing.
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A lot of the female figures the artist depicts are usually face less, this may be taken from a feminist point of view. describing a unity with other women who may have shared similar experiences at the hands of men. Emin's work depicts in places a desire to be loved and cared for, that demonstrates a naivety that is more in line with teenage expectations of love then of mature ones.
Her relationship with art, she says, only gets more intense over the years. Pointing at a bronze sculpture of two figures called The Wedding, Emin says gleefully that her studio manager had reservations about the piece because she said that the bride reminded her of Princess Fiona from Shrek. “And I said, ‘Oh wow, I watched it at Christmas and absolutely loved it.’ Subconsciously I must have taken in this supreme childlike character. My idea of marriage is like Princess Fiona, so I was so pleased when she said that.”
Emin points between the legs of a bronze, a figure on her side titled I Just Wanted to Sleep With You. “Her vagina’s just like this hole,” she says. “It’s not used, it’s a vacant thing. It should be a vortex, you go up inside it and come back the other side as another human being, but it’s no good. So it’s a different place, different space.”
"My Bed (1998) was Emin’s first readymade artwork that displayed all the forensic marks and detritus of a debauched couple of weeks where she had stayed in bed drinking, fucking, smoking, eating and sleeping, all in a state of emotional flux and dysfunctional crisis. Looking back on this scene, Emin felt appalled yet fascinated by what it had become. She shipped the bed in its entirety to Japan for an exhibition, installing it next to a pair of chained-up suitcases and a hangman’s noose which served to emphasise the painful isolation and entrapment of that whole episode. Other major sculptural works are recreated from memories of good times and inconsequential things from places in Margate such as the theme park ‘Dreamlands’ or the beach with its pier, huts and tide markers. Emin reconstructed Margate's conical helter-skelter in reclaimed timber, placing a small bird perched towards its top, representing, as its title reveals, a Self-Portrait (2001)." - white cube
The honest of Emin's work is refreshing, if not a little jaw-dropping, the use of the ready made is an provocative way to tie in context, and authenticity into the work.
Tracey Emin has married her rock. This isn’t a metaphor, by the way – some coy way of saying that the artist has finally found her soulmate. This is a story about an actual rock.
In a ceremony conducted beneath an olive tree in her garden in France, Emin joined herself in matrimony last summer with a lump of stone. It sounds a nice stone, in fairness – she has described it as venerable and impressive, with the undeniable advantage that unlike a less reliable bridegroom “it’s not going anywhere” – but still, a stone.
Needless to say, this marriage owes more to high artistic concept than kooky life decision, with drawings of it forming part of her latest exhibition (the bride wore her father’s white funeral shroud, apparently). But as ever her timing is uncanny. Emin made her name exploring taboo aspects of female sexuality – promiscuity, forbidden desire, rape, abortion – but she is now drilling down to the most dangerously provocative idea of the lot, namely the possibility of building a life without a man at its centre. And for the one in three Britons who now live alone, this idea of the search for a life not solely defined by what’s missing could hardly feel more contemporary. " - guardian article
There is something extremely melancholy surrounding marrying a inanimate object, an intrinsic loneliness, of a women unlucky in love. Worried about losing another 'love', she decided to be legally tied to something that will always be there. This is partly due to the systemic pressure to be wed by a certain age, a pressure particularly aimed towards woman. This performance is not completely a descent into madness however, but an artistic statement as part of her latest exhibition.
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