Tracey Emin

I, Tracey Emin, have had a life in two parts and here at Tate Modern I've assembled paintings, sculptures, collages and films from both...

Dame Tracey Emin RA here! The letters
stand for Royal Academician which
I've been since twenty seven. There are no more
than a hundred of us - painters, sculptors,
architects and printmakers - today.
King Charles made me a Dame to celebrate
his birthday twenty twenty-four. Like me
he is a cancer patient. Don't know what
he makes of what I do. His taste is known
to be conservative. My art's not that.  

In the nineteen nineties I destroyed
what I'd created and began again.
I killed a foetus (twice) and burned my art.
A Second Life is my Tate Modern show
in twenty twenty-six. It starts with the 
CV I wrote in ninety-five in ball point pen
to summarise my first life from conception
to the White Cube Gallery's adoption 
of me at the age of thirty-two.
A hundred tiny photographs are what
I took of all my works before I torched them.
This is Major Retrospective One.
My earliest passport's there and so's a tooth
with an appointment card to see the dentist:
my art's not about me, my art is me.
Thus the centrepiece, the exhibition 
star, is My Bed (nineteen ninety-eight),
my artist's life laid bare in all its squalor,
misery, sex, booze and poverty,
the filthy rectangle of carpet like
a canvas collaged with my rancid slippers, 
empty vodka bottle, half-squeezed tube
of KY gell, fag packets, fading newsprint,
tampon applicator, scattered coppers, 
soft toy, aspirins, pack of polaroids
and screwed up tissues round a wooden stool
with overflowing ashtray, dirty beaker
and assorted bits of rubbish. Tights
lie carelessly discarded on my duvet
with my rumpled sheet and double mattress
torn and stained. A yard or two away
my luggage chained and roped in bondage
tells of being trapped in transience.

Experience equates with art, my school said.
I then joked, 'experience meequales'
and sewed this to a blanket with a dozen
patterned fabrics and as many written
texts which come across as poetry.
My handwriting is personal where print ain't. 
Words are in my work as appliqué
on giant textiles, woollen covers, cotton
bedsheets, patchwork quilts as canvases
created at my turning points: my early 
years in Hotel International;
my schooldays in The Year was Sev'nty Seven;
my wild teenage in Mad Tracey and
my liberating trip across teh US 
with my nan's antique upholstered throne
which I inherited and appliquéd in
There's a Lot of Money in Chairs. Granny
meant not that chairs were a good investment,
but that people find loose change inside 
the crevices. Of course, because I've made
of it an artwork now, there is indeed 
a lot of money in it. How ironic.
Words eventually become my art.
Neon slogans, phrases, messages - 
I see a line of beauty on the flowing script.
It's not me that's crying it's my soul.
Meet me in heaven I will wait for you.

My canvases, unframed, show me unclothed
regretting rape, abortion, loss, betrayal -
traumas I'm unable to forget,
experiences which have never healed.
The paint spills, crimson drips for mourning mum - 
I was Too Young to Carry Your Remains -
chalk white for shame - Abortion Waiting Room -
ominous coal black for death's dark shadow - 
I Watched Myself Die and Come Alive.
I paint the pattern of a Turkish rug
in detail in the latter, plus an altar
and a fireplace, opaque and dreamlike.
God died and the earth went dark. I painted
Crucifixion twenty twenty-two
when I was diagnosed with cancer. Two years 
on I sculpted a contorted bronze 
Ascension with a single bending leg,
no arms and twisting torso like the Venus 
in the Louvre and to finish in
a glass bowl on a red base is my Death-Mask
which I made when I was not yet forty.
With my wrinkled lip and eyes tight shut,
I'm dead to those who once had called me slut.