Entering the confessional

In the somewhat conservative world of British art, she's a rebel, an outsider shaking the cage of the establishment. Tracey Emin doesn't exactly fit the profile for a major British artist. She's not from a connected family and doesn't exactly "toe the line" in her work; but she's become the poster girl for the new generation of British art.

Emin was born in London in 1963 but brought up in Margate, a sleepy seaside town in Kent. While her upbringing was fairly unremarkable, her life was shattered in her early teens when she was raped. That event led her to a life of promiscuity, dangerously mixed with drug and alcohol abuse.

By 1984 however, she had her life in order enough to enrol in the Maidstone College of Art, where she was awarded a bachelor's degree in fine art. In 1989, she completed her MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. During her time there, she developed her interest in the works of the expressionists, particularly Munch and Schiele. Emin's paintings from the time were heavily influenced by their expressionist sensibilities. Her personal life however remained in turmoil and around that time, she fell pregnant.

After having an abortion, she fell into a deep funk, a state she would later describe as her "emotional suicide". In the midst of this depression, she destroyed virtually all her works.

At this point, the lives of Emin and the playwright Sarah Kane reveal disturbing parallels. Thankfully though, Emin did not go down the same road of depression and loss that Kane experienced. Instead, Emin went back to work, building her reputation to the point that by 1993, she was exhibiting her pieces. An American tour followed in 1994, and she staged her first significant solo exhibition at the White Cube gallery in London, ironically titled "My Major Retrospective". The display included personal items and photos of the destroyed paintings.

The exhibition made people sit up and take notice. Here was an artist who was not so concerned with the formal aspects of art as the story that her works told - the story of her life. Her highly confessional works confronted and (in some instances) disturbed the viewer.

Since then, Emin has continued to work consistently, building a reputation as one of Europe's foremost contemporary artists. Her work has been embraced not only in the UK, but in continental Europe, particularly in Germany. In the past year, she staged a major exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich. She also achieved notoriety earlier this year when her cat became lost. Emin made posters and put them up around the London suburb where she lives. When word spread that Emin's work was available for free on lampposts, "collectors" swarmed the suburb for the posters. Thankfully, the loss of the posters didn't affect Emin's primary objective, and her cat Docket was found unharmed.

She continues with her confessional and confrontational style, utilising events from her life as the basis for her work. In contrast to her days at the RCA, she has moved away from "pure" painting and has taken up new and unusual media in her work. She brings techniques ranging from story telling, drawing, filmmaking, installation, painting, neon, photography, appliquéd blankets and sculpture.

The use of neon is one of the most striking motifs in her work. Reflecting both the power of modern advertising and its wonderful tackiness, Emin's neon works have become some of her most recognisable. That doesn't mean they don't say something too though. A work like "You Forgot to Kiss My Soul" (2001) expresses in one simple work the hopes, fears and frustrations of an entire relationship.

Emin has grabbed headlines for the graphic nature of some of her pieces, most notoriously "My Bed" (1998), in which the artist's unmade bed is strewn with the detritus of relationships past - including used condoms. Similarly "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 - 1995" (1995) forces the viewer to face up to their own personal histories, a process which can be extremely discomfiting. Not that Emin is only about unsettling her audience. She infuses her work with humour and a zest for life that belies her more serious concerns.

In addition to her art, Emin is a writer contributing to magazines and a major book about her art is slated for publication this year. In May 2002, the BBC reported that Emin was to collaborate with noted British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom on a film of her life. Unfortunately, Emin's work has not as yet been exhibited in Australia, but as her reputation grows and she is increasingly recognised as a cutting-edge artist with a fine grasp of her material, an exhibition on these shores can't be too far off.

David Edwards

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Tracey Emin

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