Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous.
Emin’s work has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. By re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques – or ‘women’s work’ – for radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the ‘personal as political’. In Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, Emin used the process of appliqué to inscribe the names of lovers, friends and family within a small tent, into which the viewer had to crawl inside, becoming both voyeur and confidante. Her interest in the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele particularly inform Emin’s paintings, monoprints and drawings, which explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.
Monoprints
Emin’s monoprints are a well documented part of her creative output. These unique drawings represent a diaristic aspect and frequently depict events from the past for example, Poor Love (1999), From The Week of Hell ’94 (1995) and Ripped Up (1995), which relate to a traumatic experience after an abortion or other personal events as seen in Fuck You Eddy (1995) and Sad Shower in New York (1995) which are both part of the Tate’s collection of Emin’s art.
Often they incorporate text as well as image, although some bear only text and others only image. The text appears as the artist’s stream of consciousness voice. Some critics have compared Emin’s text-only monoprints to ransom notes. The rapid, one-off technique involved in making monoprints is perfectly suited to (apparently) immediate expression, as is Emin’s scratchy and informal drawing style. Emin frequently misspells words, deliberately or due to the speed at which she did each drawing. In a 2002 interview with Lynn Barber, Emin said, “It’s not cute affectation. If I could spell, then I would spell correctly, but I never bothered to learn. So, rather than be inhibited and say I can’t write because I can’t spell, I just write and get on with it.
Emin created a key series of monoprints in 1997 with the text Something’s Wrong or There Must Be Something Terebley Wrong With Me written with spelling mistakes intact in large capital letters alongside “forlorn figures surrounded by space, their outlines fragile on the page. Some are complete bodies, others only female torsos, legs splayed and with odd, spidery flows gushing from their vaginas. They are all accompanied by the legend There’s Something Wrong.”
Other key monoprints include a series from 1994 and 1995 known as the Illustrations from Memory series which document Emin’s childhood memories of sexual awakening and other experiences growing up in Margate such as Fucking Down An Ally 16/5/95 (1995) and Illustrations from Memory, the year 1974. In The Livingroom (1994). Emin further produced a set of monoprints detailing her memories of Margate‘s iconic buildings such as Margate Harbour 16/5/95 (1995), The Lido 16/5/95 (1995) and Light House 15/5/95 (1995). Other drawings from 1994 include the Family Suite series, part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art collection, consisting of 20 monoprints with “archetypal themes in Emin’s art: sex, her family, her abortions, and Margate”. This series of monoprints was displayed for the first time from August 2008 at the Edinburgh based gallery as part of her first major retrospective, which has been called the Summer Blockbuster exhibition. A further Family Suite II set was exhibited in Los Angeles in November 2007 as part of Emin’s solo show at Gagosian gallery. Emin’s monoprints are rarely displayed alone in exhibitions, they’re particularly effective as collective fragments of intense emotional confrontation. Emin has made several works documenting painful moments of sadness and loneliness experienced when travelling to foreign cities for various exhibitions such as Thinking of You (2005) and Bath White I (2005) which were from a series of monoprints drawn directly onto the USA Mondrian hotel stationery.. Emin herself has said, “Being an artist isn’t just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it’s some kind of communication, a message.
In 2009, Emin along with book publisher Rizzoli released a book titled One Thousand Drawings. As the title suggests, the book contains 1000 drawings of Emin’s career since 1988. The book was released to coincide with Emin’s show Those who suffer love at White Cube which is mainly a drawings show. Emin said in an interview that “We actually looked at about 2000 drawings and then chose 1000 drawings [for the book]… I’d probably done, over that period of time about 4000 drawings”.
Monoprint drawings of mothers and children that Emin drew during a pregnancy in 1990 were included in a 2010 joint exhibition with Paula Rego and Mat Collishaw at the Foundling Museum.
“Monoprints are alchemic,” says Tracey. “You can never be quite sure how it’s going to come out until you’ve finished.”
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracey_Emin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracey_Emin#Monoprints
Becki P Printmaker 