Pure Traceyland

By Ana Finel Honigman photographs by scott macnee

Warm, funny, and super-sharp, Tracey Emin, perhaps her era’s most notorious and controversial artist, talks to Ana Finel Honigman about finding calm away from the clawing crowds. She is the best-known female artist in British history, but, as she explains, fame and feminism are more complex than they might seem.

Over tea and soft-boiled eggs on the sunny patio outside Tracey Emin’s recently purchased East End studio, she tells me that the unmistakable sense of calm pervading her new, clean, serene space is due to its being built over a buried Druid stone-circle. She describes the “mini Stonehenge” deep underneath her Japanese stone walkway and well-ordered downstairs workspace consecrating the enclosed row of two-story houses, but I believe the source of the calm comes more from herself. Having just touched ground after a round of interviews promoting her new project—a soon-to-be-released-on-DVD film entitled Top Spot that has been weighted down by misguided controversy—Emin is eager to avoid rehashing previously processed material and instead wants to talk mainly about the studio, which has quickly become her sanctuary.

In her remarkable recent show at London’s White Cube gallery, “When I think about Sex... ,” Emin presented a body of almost all-white sculpture, drawing, paintings, and readymades. The opening for her first solo exhibition in London since 2001 was so crowded that the people carpeting Hoxton Square outside called it “Tracey-palooza,” after the massive American rock festival, in homage to her rock-star status in the public imagination. But the work on display inside—most of it related to sex—was more complicated, and signaled that Emin’s reputation, and the color’s symbolism, are not as clear as often assumed. In the exhibit, Emin’s palette shifted from smoky cotton to cream to blinding, blanched white, while her medium ranged from embroidered quilts and neon to faint ink drawings, prize ribbons, and a plaster leg cast pristinely preserved in a vitrine. Hanging over the cast was a Polaroid of Emin, nude except for the cast, her flesh and hair offering the few spots of color in the show. The other, more prominent deviation from her palette was an enormous weathered wood sculpture recreating her childhood home in Margate.

White is perfect for Emin. Perhaps the most paradoxical of colors, it is best associated in the West with brides and purity, yet it is also the color of sexual fluids, blank canvases, cocaine, fluorescent office lighting, cigarette paper, and hospital sheets—and in many Eastern cultures, it is the color of mourning. Its versatility is especially well-suited to Emin’s art, which is equally paradoxical—vulgar and vulnerable, mercenary and honest, brash and generous. In a bitterly touching appliqué quilt on view in the show, Emin stitched the words “Stupid Drunk Bitch” in white letters on a white background and sections of a faded red rose-petal pattern, and then applied slash lines over “Stupid,” and inserted the word “Super.” In this, as in other works, Emin revealed herself to be as decadent and pure as fresh cream.

Emin is now striving to bring more calm and clarity to her daily life. Her previous studio was located next to that of her friend and fellow White Cube artist, Gary Hume. In its previous lives, it had been a butcher’s shop for two hundred years, was converted into a coat factory, and was finally rented out as studio space. There she and Hume hosted teeming parties that spilled out into the vast rooftop garden. Now, she foresees wanting to keep her new studio space private.

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							Pure Traceyland By Ana Finel Honigman photographs by scott macnee Warm, funny, and super-sharp, Tracey Emin, perhaps her era’s most notorious and controversial artist, talks to Ana Finel Honigman about finding calm away from the clawing crowds. She is the best-known female artist in British history, but, as she explains, fame and feminism are more complex than they might seem. Over tea and soft-boiled eggs on the sunny patio outside Tracey Emin’s recently purchased East End studio, she tells me that the unmistakable sense of calm pervading her new, clean, serene space is due to its being built over a buried Druid stone-circle. She describes the “mini Stonehenge” deep underneath her Japanese stone walkway and well-ordered downstairs workspace consecrating the enclosed row of two-story houses, but I believe the source of the calm comes more from herself. Having just touched ground after a round of interviews promoting her new project—a soon-to-be-released-on-DVD film entitled Top Spot that has been weighted down by misguided controversy—Emin is eager to avoid rehashing previously processed material and instead wants to talk mainly about the studio, which has quickly become her sanctuary. In her remarkable recent show at London’s White Cube gallery, “When I think about Sex... ,” Emin presented a body of almost all-white sculpture, drawing, paintings, and readymades. The opening for her first solo exhibition in London since 2001 was so crowded that the people carpeting Hoxton Square outside called it “Tracey-palooza,” after the massive American rock festival, in homage to her rock-star status in the public imagination. But the work on display inside—most of it related to sex—was more complicated, and signaled that Emin’s reputation, and the color’s symbolism, are not as clear as often assumed. In the exhibit, Emin’s palette shifted from smoky cotton to cream to blinding, blanched white, while her medium ranged from embroidered quilts and neon to faint ink drawings, prize ribbons, and a plaster leg cast pristinely preserved in a vitrine. Hanging over the cast was a Polaroid of Emin, nude except for the cast, her flesh and hair offering the few spots of color in the show. The other, more prominent deviation from her palette was an enormous weathered wood sculpture recreating her childhood home in Margate. White is perfect for Emin. Perhaps the most paradoxical of colors, it is best associated in the West with brides and purity, yet it is also the color of sexual fluids, blank canvases, cocaine, fluorescent office lighting, cigarette paper, and hospital sheets—and in many Eastern cultures, it is the color of mourning. Its versatility is especially well-suited to Emin’s art, which is equally paradoxical—vulgar and vulnerable, mercenary and honest, brash and generous. In a bitterly touching appliqué quilt on view in the show, Emin stitched the words “Stupid Drunk Bitch” in white letters on a white background and sections of a faded red rose-petal pattern, and then applied slash lines over “Stupid,” and inserted the word “Super.” In this, as in other works, Emin revealed herself to be as decadent and pure as fresh cream. Emin is now striving to bring more calm and clarity to her daily life. Her previous studio was located next to that of her friend and fellow White Cube artist, Gary Hume. In its previous lives, it had been a butcher’s shop for two hundred years, was converted into a coat factory, and was finally rented out as studio space. There she and Hume hosted teeming parties that spilled out into the vast rooftop garden. Now, she foresees wanting to keep her new studio space private. order issue 3
	Fall 2006