LONDON — Tracey Emin is an artist in demand.
There was a long queue for the British artist’s talk at Frieze Masters with Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the British Museum, and dubbed “Confessions in the Museum.” The talk was part of Dunhill’s partnership with the art fair.
Emin will be presented with the the amfAR Award of Inspiration at amfAR London tonight for her artistic accomplishments and efforts supporting AIDS- and HIV-related causes.
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Next spring, she will showcase her biggest work to date with “A Second Life,” an exhibition at the Tate Modern.
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Emin is at her happiest when surrounded by art and making art.
“I wanted to be an artist since I was 12. I’ve never really had a job and when I had absolutely no money at all, I grew potatoes on my balcony. I didn’t steal, but I took everything I could that was free. I’d often have no electricity. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to work. I didn’t want to have a job. I wanted to be an artist. I had an abortion. I wanted to be an artist,” she said.
The artist recalled that when she was studying for her master of arts in painting at the Royal College of Art, sometimes she would stay on the bus past her stop and get off at Trafalgar Square to visit the National Gallery, where she would make her way to the basement where the early Renaissance art was kept.
She would get her sketchbook out and start drawing in a room that she described as “gold.”
“I’d stay there for about an hour and then I would come out the doors and push them with my eyes closed. As I push the doors, I’d imagine my paintings would be in the next room, and I’d go ‘urgh’ and shudder,” Emin said.
“I thought the day that I can leave that room and see my paintings, that’s the day when I know that I’m OK, that I’m doing all right. The closest I’ve got to that was in Florence,” she said, referring to “Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude” at the Palazzo Strozzi.
Emin admitted that museums were never really part of her upbringing. She remembers coming face to face with ancient artifacts and relics instead on trips to the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.
She said if she could own any piece of art it would be John the Baptist’s right arm that’s kept in gold-embellished silver reliquary. “Imagine what that hand has touched,” Emin added.
It’s only recently that the big museums have started acquiring the artist’s work.
“I think it’s because when I had cancer, they all thought I was going to die [and it would be even more expensive then],” Emin said.
Her subject matters have always been serious, but the artist has struggled with how the art institutions responded to her work.
“One of the reasons why I wasn’t taken seriously is because I didn’t appear to take myself seriously. I’m going to let everybody off, [and all the] establishment, because I think there’s also a reflection for me. But my work [and] the subject matter has never changed, except it’s much easier for museums to buy a painting than it is for them to buy a story or me reading it out, [or my film about abortion] ‘How It Feels,’” Emin said.
“It’s much easier for them to buy an abortion painting. I think now establishments have caught up with me and I’m apparently doing the right thing-ish and I’m getting away with it now because it’s all disguised. It’s like a Trojan horse.”
This summer Emin closed her show “Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn. The exhibition featured paintings from 2007 to the present on the themes of love, loss, hope and grief.
“I doubt I will be having many shows in America,” she said. “As women, most of the time, we’re not listened to and you can say I’ve been screaming, but I will carry on screaming until I’m heard talking about the issues that are important.”
Art has been a cathartic practice for the Croydon-born artist. Even in the difficult times during her battle with cancer, she found solace and energy in art.
The experience has changed her into becoming a happier person and her relationship with art is stronger than ever.
“When you make art and it’s on the wall — thousands and millions of people go and look at it, the ones that are sincere and genuine, they leave a bit of their soul trapped in that work of art, that’s what makes it meaningful and gives it presence, not just the artist that made it,” Emin said.
“There’s a transference of energy, alchemy and souls — that’s why art is so [much more] important now than it’s ever been. There is so much hate, greed and the worst things that could ever be happening in our lifetime are now happening — and art is the complete antithesis to that.”
Emin is on a path to making more art than ever.