1. MAY 2011 / G/ XX
EMIN, TRACEY With her first exhibition of sculptures
opening at London’s Hayward Gallery next month, the celebrated
mistress of confessional creations resolves to push the boundaries
more than ever before. Here, SOPHIE HASTINGS uncovers some
extraordinary truths about out beloved Tracey
Theloveofmakingart:
‘MoreIsMoore’by
MatCollishawand
TraceyEmin,2011
A R T S P E C I A L
‘I feel like I’ve had my
wings clipped. I want
to push myself forward.
No more saving of ideas
– it’s not worth it’

2. INTERVIEWING TRACEY EMIN IS ALWAYS AN ADVENTURE.
Our first, eight years ago, lasted two days, beginning at her Spitalfields
house with vegetable soup she’d made earlier, followed by a swim at
a private club, a sauna, sushi, drinks at her local, the Golden Heart,
a photoshoot at Sketch, a ride on the London Eye, the Serpentine Summer
Party and her 40th-birthday party at her studio. We did another in 2007
by the pool of her hotel in Venice, where she represented Britain at the
Biennale. Her then boyfriend, Scott Douglas, was supposed to do the pho-
tographs, but he’d goneAWOL with Norman Cook (who’d DJ’d at her party
the night before) so her assistant, Alex, took digital snaps of her under
a towel on a sun-lounger and e-mailed them to the paper.There have been
others and they tend to involve a pool and copious amounts of white wine.
This time, before we meet at her new studio off Brick Lane, east London,
I receive a call suggesting I bring my swimming costume. Having been to
the studio for a fundraiser for her forthcoming show at the Hayward
Gallery, I know we won’t need to leave the building for our swim, and
I think of her iconic, ironic self-portrait in a short, tight dress, bare legs
akimbo, money pouring out of her vagina, coins all over the floor, hands
clutching the notes piling up on her abdomen: “I’ve Got It All”, 2000.
Emin’s studio is the embodiment of her success. In the basement, she’s
built a lap pool and steam room. On the ground floor, her car, a Mini (she
gave her BMW Z4 to Douglas as a parting gift), is parked and rooms lead
to more rooms of neatly stored paraphernalia. Upstairs, an office gives on
to the vast studio space in which she works – a long table, pieces of work
in progress, an outsize beanbag, a kitchen and fridges, and lots of tiny
chairs, an Emin-ish juxtaposition of epic and cute.
At one end is the office of her merchandising company, Emin Interna-
tional, which sells things such as Rothko-inspired comfort blankets, mugs
with pictures of her cat on and books of the poetry that she wrote for GQ.
Talking about middle age, she tells me her young staff laugh at her wrin-
kles: “Well, at least they can’t sack me.” Then she looks at me and says,
“You’re still beautiful, but you’ve only got a few years. After that your
skin will begin to flay. It happens overnight.” She holds her stomach and
squidges it. “Imagine what it’s like being a sexy woman with a sticking-out
tummy. From the back, I’m fantastic and almost any man would want me,
but from the front it’s a different story.’ But middle age has its perks: she’s
bought a speedboat to go with her house in the south of France, and
recently had dinner at Number Ten.
By this time, we have ditched the idea of a swim, finished the bottle and
moved on to dinner at a local restaurant. She shushes me every time
a well-known name comes up in conversation, as
though rogue reporters are hovering in every
corner, but I can’t blame her: she is incredibly
recognisable, has had her bin rifled on occasions
and, most shockingly of all, been called the art
world’s Jade Goody or Jordan. “It’s like these
Oxbridge-educated journalists think that anyone
who didn’t go to boarding school is the same. I’ve
challenged them, explained I actually got a first-
class degree and an MA, but they don’t hear.”
Fascinatingly, she has a female cousin, Meral
Hussein-Ece, in the House of Lords: they share
a great-grandfather who was a slave in the
Ottoman Empire around 1860. “We haven’t met
yet because I’m doing that programme Who Do
You Think You Are? and we’ve postponed our
meeting for the delectation of the media,” she
says, smiling her wonky smile. Class should be
discussed more, she thinks. Intelligence, drive
and innate skill are key to transcending
a deprived background like her own. However,
she concedes that “without an education, you’re
f***ed. Our education system is bad and there
are problems with the NHS. There shouldn’t be
people living below the poverty line.” I wonder
if she mentioned all this at dinner with David
Cameron when she sat next to him. “Well, he’s
open and enthusiastic and very young for
a prime minister,” she says, with a surge of opti-
mism. “But Downing Street isn’t very sexy – just
a lot of offices and some good art.”
We walk to the Golden Heart for a last drink.
“I’m going to look very ‘Benny Hill woman’ this
summer,” she ruminates, “with my hair blowing
in the wind, crashing through the waves at the
speed of knots on my boat. Only men usually
have that kind of thing. When I said I was
getting a boat, everyone expected me to get
a small, vintage sailing dingy, not a twin-engine
Lomac RIB that goes at the speed of light. But
as long as it gives me more freedom, that’s what
I’m screaming for. I have felt so trapped.”
Love her or loathe her – it’s about 50-50,
according to her – Emin has had more impact on
Britain’s relationship to contemporary art than any other living artist. She
is not remote: she is available, living and feeling publicly, no matter how
painful this becomes. Her art belongs to everyone, carved into the national
psyche. If, in middle age, she is finally able to free herself from the remain-
ing inhibitions even she must carry from childhood, then perhaps the best
work is yet to come. It is worth a trip to the Hayward for those remarkable
sculptures and to witness the ambition of an artist in full flow. At almost
48, she knows where she’s going: “I’m not going to look like one of the
most beautiful women in the world, but I’ll look like one of the best.”
Tracey’s show, Love Is What You Want, is at the Hayward Gallery from
18 May to 29 August. haywardgallery.org.uk
MAY 2011 / G/ XXXX / G/ MAY 2011
PHOTOGRAPHRICHARDYOUNG
What is this brazen merchandising? “Well, you
can buy pieces signed by me that are genuine and
available from £10. The multiples aren’t big, so
I’ll move on and do other things and they become
rare,” she reasons. Up a final flight of stairs, you
reach the pièce de résistance, a roof terrace that
makes Shoreditch House look poky, with the
most extraordinary 360-degree panorama of the
city, as good as the London Eye but with much
more room to play. The building was once used as a place for destitute
women to shelter, she says. “They slept on ropes and one of them was killed
by Jack the Ripper. Actually it was a different building, but the same site.”
We are poured glasses of wine by a Japanese assistant, who Emin calls
“little Jap” with palpable fondness, when she declines to join us for a drink.
It is immediately clear that, despite appearing to have it all, Emin is fragile.
She’s had some year: “In 2010, my dad died, I had my boobs cut off, Louise
Bourgeois [with whom she collaborated on a show] died, my boyfriend left
me and I broke my ribs. The ribs weren’t that serious, but it set me back
because it reminded me that I’m on my own and vulnerable.” She also had
five international exhibitions and managed to start work on the Hayward
show, which opens in May. “And I built my studio, in the middle of a massive
recession. I employed more than 100 people, hired cranes, took on huge
financial responsibility and I didn’t realise it would be this big. It’s scary as
a lone female. Like when someone’s pregnant and then gives birth only to
realise that you have to look after this thing forever. But I’ve made my bed
and have to lie in it... don’t use that!” She cackles with laughter.
Her installation, “My Bed”, to which she is attempting not to refer, was
the work that made her famous, admired and reviled in equal measure,
and lost her the Turner Prize in 1999, and seems to be from another time;
her life is so beautifully wrought now, so far from that squalid, condom-
strewn expression of existential angst, and yet part of her longs to reclaim
the rage. “It’s definitely a midlife crisis. Being nearly 50, I’ve got another
30 years, ten good ones,” she says. “I’m not looking to meet the man of
my life and have children, it’s not going to happen – I must go for work.
I want to have the same kind of balls I had at 20.” What happened to them?
“I was castrated by work, by toeing the line. I’ve felt intimidated, part of
me always pulls back in my work, maybe because I go so far in life. I feel
I’ve had my wings clipped. Now I want to push myself forward. No more
saving of ideas – it’s not worth it. It’s like saving a really good bottle of
champagne – there’s no point. Drink it now.”
H
er big departure is sculpture: huge, figurative pieces that
will be placed on the roof of the Hayward. There is a ma-
quette of one of them in the studio and it looks exactly like
one of her drawings of a body, like she’s drawn in the air,
in clay. “I’ve only ever made tiny sculptures, so their being
made monumental, is new,” she says. “I made the maquettes the night I was
supposed to be packing for NewYear inThailand, my first holiday for years.
I couldn’t leave till I’d done my figurines; I had to get it right. It’s an inter-
nal feeling and a work ethic; then I could have a lovely time.”
The exhibition, she says, is a “survey show” with some new and some
unseen work – not a retrospective, which simply looks back. “It explains
my practice. If you don’t know what I do, you’ll come out knowing. I’ve
been quite heavy-handed. I can hear the critics now – ‘Do we need this
rammed down our throats?’ – but I’m not doing it for them, it’s for people
who don’t know. I don’t want it subtle, I want it powerful.”
Among many other exhibits, there will be a room of 30 vagina paintings,
a disco room with films and neons, a trauma room with work relating to her
abortions and childhood sexual abuse, and a Carl Freedman gallery that will
house Emin’s exhibition, Memphis, that Freedman put on at his east London
gallery Counter Editions in 2003. “It’s full of memorabilia, looking back on
my life through objects that are valuable to me, but rubbish to others. Like
Memphis outside Cairo, once the cradle of civilisation, now
a rubbish dump and landfill site.” Emin will also take questions from the
public every day. The show is called Love Is What You Want, a line from
the Marc Bolan song “Planet Queen”. “The next line is, ‘Flying saucer take
me away,’” says Emin. “There’s an air of desperation about it, which is
honesty. By the time my show is out, I will be feeling pretty desperate.”
What about? “Love. Living without the romance of being in love is like
being in limbo. I saw a soothsayer in Hong Kong who said I mustn’t have
any men now, I have to send them away till September. Then I can only
have relationships with a dog, dragon, pig or goat. I haven’t had sex for
so long, come September I’ll be going up the f***ing wall, and I’ll have to
say, ‘Stop! What sign are you?’The good news is, I live to a really old age.”
But middle age is already causing problems. “There are no men. I know
that within the next month no one’s going to ring me up for a date. Some-
times I meet someone and talk to them for two
hours and their parting shot is, ‘Can I have your
autograph for my girlfriend?’”
Her work has always been full of sexual
longing, passion and disappointment, with love
letters scrawled on paper, embroidered on blan-
kets, written in neon. “People like you need to
f*** people like me,” reads a neon; “Kiss me, kiss
me, cover my body in love”; “Fantastic to feel
beautiful again,” say others. Her blankets,
homely and feminine to look at, often scream
with fury and loss: “Psycho slut” or, “You don’t
f*** me over”. Has she changed with age? “I’ve
mellowed and widened my remit – I’ll consider
any age between 29 and 65. But even the
65-year-old will have a 25-year-old girlfriend.”
Emin says she’s given up on some things, that
some fights aren’t worth it, but sexual passion,
which, for her, means monogamous love, is
a perennial goal. “With really good sex, I feel like
I’ve been crucified. I’ve gone. I come back
through the other person. You can’t beat it – an
electric, out-of-body experience, not as simple
as an orgasm. You can have your brains f***ed
out, but you’d still remember your mum’s maiden
name. When you lose yourself, then it’s love.”
I’m wondering why she had the boob job,
reducing those fabulous breasts that must have
garnered her masses of male attention; they were
certainly adored by the press. “They were 34GG;
Jordan proportions. I’ve never met a man in my
life who likes big breasts: they get swallowed up,
suffocated.”They say they like them, don’t they?
“Yes, but it’s just an idea, not reality. Does the
Editor of GQ really like big breasts? I don’t think
so.” She is laughing, but the problem was serious,
she says. “They started growing when I put on
weight a couple of years ago and just didn’t stop,
even when I lost the weight. My whole personal-
ity was becoming a breast. I couldn’t work prop-
erly, I stooped forward when I sat, I looked ma-
tronly and we all know I’m not that.”
She went to NewYork and the world’s two best
breast surgeons flew in. It’s a complicated opera-
tion, and she has the scars to show for it – she pulls up her top at the drop
of a hat – but it’s all her own breast tissue, “so they’re still sensitive”. Men
should encourage their wives and girlfriends to have this operation, she
says, as it’s really difficult walking around with enormous breasts. “I lost
3kg [6.6lb] when I cut them off. Swimming isn’t as good now – they were
like floats – but it was life-changing to lose them.”
She almost didn’t do it after tabloid pictures appeared of Kate Moss, Stella
McCartney and friends kissing her breasts outside a party. “We’d been sent
outside because of a fire alarm and they all came and nestled in my breasts.
I thought, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ Then I thought, ‘Yes, if six women
can come and live in my breasts, there’s something wrong.’”
PHOTOGRAPHPATRICKBARTH/REX;LIMANG
Prizedexhibit:Stella
McCartneyandKate
Mosstakeshelterwith
TraceyEminatthe
Roundhouse,London,
February2010
‘With really
good sex
I feel like
I’ve been
crucified. You
can’t beat it
– an electric,
out-of-body
experience’
Bedtime(fromtop):TraceyEmin’s
‘MyBed’attheTateGallery’sTurnerPrize
exhibition,1999;Japaneseperformanceduo
CaiYuanandJJXiin‘TwoArtistsJumpOn
TraceyEmin’sBed’,1999
A R T S P E C I A L