Tracey Emin

Tracey Karima Emin (born 3 July 1963) is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork.

She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué.

The result was her "tent" Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, which was first exhibited in the show.

Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.

She studied fashion at Medway College of Design (now part of the University for the Creative Arts) (1980–82).

There she met expelled student Billy Childish and was associated with The Medway Poets.

From 1983–86 she studied printmaking at Maidstone Art College (now part of the University for the Creative Arts).

She graduated with a first class degree in Printmaking.

Also, whilst at Maidstone college of Art, Tracey Emin encountered Roberto Navikas, a name which was later to feature prominently in her "tent" (see below).

Emin and Childish were a couple until 1987, during which time she was the administrator for his small press, Hangman Books, which published Childish's confessional poetry.

In 1987, Emin moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where in 1989 she obtained an MA in painting.

After graduation, she had two traumatic abortions and those experiences led her to destroy all the art she had produced in graduate school and later described the period as "emotional suicide".

Her influences included Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, and for a time she studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.

One of the paintings that survive from her time at Royal College of Art is Friendship, which is in the Royal College of Art Collection.

Additionally, a series of photographs from her early work that was not destroyed was displayed as part of My Major Retrospective.

In the mid-1990s, Emin had a relationship with Carl Freedman, who had been an early friend of, and collaborator with, Damien Hirst, and who had co-curated seminal Britart shows, such as Modern Medicine and Gambler.

In 1993, Emin opened a shop with fellow artist Sarah Lucas, called The Shop at 103 Bethnal Green Road in Bethnal Green, which sold works by the two of them, including T-shirts and ashtrays with Damien Hirst's picture stuck to the bottom.

In November 1993, Emin had her first solo show at White Cube, a contemporary art gallery in London.

It was called My Major Retrospective, and was autobiographical, consisting of personal photographs, photos of her (destroyed) early paintings, as well as items which most artists would not consider showing in public (such as a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when he was decapitated in a car crash).

In 1994, they toured the US together, driving in a Cadillac from San Francisco to New York, and making stops en route where she gave readings from her autobiographical book Exploration of the Soul to finance the trip.

In 1995, she was interviewed in the Minky Manky show catalogue by Carl Freedman, who asked her, "Which person do you think has had the greatest influence on your life?"

She replied, "Uhmm... It's not a person really. It was more a time, going to Maidstone College of Art, hanging around with Billy Childish, living by the River Medway".

In 1995, Freedman curated the show Minky Manky at the South London Gallery.

Emin has said,"At that time Sarah (Lucas) was quite famous, but I wasn't at all. Carl said to me that I should make some big work as he thought the small-scale stuff I was doing at the time wouldn't stand up well. I was furious. Making that work was my way at getting back at him."

In 1997, her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of everyone the artist had ever slept with, was shown at Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London.

In the same year, she gained considerable media exposure when she swore repeatedly when drunk on a live British TV discussion programme called The Death of Painting.

In 1999, Emin had her first solo exhibition in the United States at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled Every Part of Me's Bleeding.

Later that year, she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed – a readymade installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux.

The artwork featured used condoms and blood-stained underwear.

The couple spent time by the sea in Whitstable together, using a beach hut that she uprooted and turned into art in 1999 with the title The Last Thing I Said to You is Don't Leave Me Here, and that was destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire.

Emin is also a panellist and speaker: she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2010), the Royal Academy of Arts (2008), and the Tate Britain in London (2005) about the links between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art.

In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy; with Fiona Rae, she is one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768.

Emin lived in Spitalfields, East London

before returning to Margate where she funds the TKE Studios with workspace for aspiring artists.

Emin was born in Croydon, a district of south London, to an English mother of Romanichal descent and a Turkish Cypriot father.

She was brought up in Margate, Kent, with her twin brother, Paul.

Emin shares a paternal great-grandfather with her second cousin Meral Hussein-Ece, Baroness Hussein-Ece.

Her work has been analysed within the context of early adolescent and childhood abuse, as well as sexual assault.

Emin was raped at the age of 13 while living in Margate, citing assaults in the area as "what happened to a lot of girls."

Emin later said in an article she wrote for the Evening Standard that she had "no memory of being a virgin", citing numerous times she was raped as a young teenager.