Tracey Emin - My favourite little bird (Framed)

  
Tracey Emin  

 Born in Croydon, London in 1963 and brought up in Margate, Kent, Tracey Emin is one of the leading British contemporary artists working today.  Known for her highly personal autobiographical and confessional works, Emin produces art in a wide variety of mediums - installations, embroidery, drawings, etchings, prints, video, painting and photography.

Infamous for her work in the 90’s which saw her as part of the controversial YBA’s group (Young British Artists) Emin gained an MA for painting at the Royal College of Art after an influential period in Margate studying both printing and fashion. In the early 90’s, career collaborations and projects with Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst meant Emin became known in art circles - with her notorious embroidered ‘tent’ Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 being purchased by Charles Saatchi. She was then propelled to public notoriety in 1997 by speaking on live TV about the Turner Prize in a group discussion, where Emin stated she was drunk and swore. “Are they really real people in England watching this programme now, they really watching, really watching it?”  Two years on, in 1999, Emin herself was nominated for the Turner Prize. Since the 90’s Emin has had major exhibitions internationally, including a Twenty Years retrospective in 2008, which smashed all records for visitor attendance for a living artist. She has since become a Royal Academician.

Emin’s work is uniquely personalised to her own life experiences, but her confessions laid bare so blatant and openly invite the viewer to reflect on their own private past lives, secrets and sexual desires. It is akin to a collective opening of all of our teenage diaries, love letters and medical records. Although she came into the public consciousness with her installations - such as her unmade ‘bed’, Emin’s paintings, drawings and prints are equally as evocative, with themes ranging from sexual experiences, mental anxiety, her family, childhood in Margate and her beautiful - but lesser known - animals and birds. Much of her work focuses on the domestic world of women, highlighting a through line of shared female experience that has been hidden from the world for centuries - and continues to be.

“William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh” - David Bowie on Tracey Emin.