Tracey Emin

Dame Tracey Karima Emin was born on 3 July 1963 in Croydon, south London, to an English mother of Romanichal descent and a Turkish Cypriot father. She grew up in Margate, Kent, with her twin brother Paul. Her paternal great-grandfather is also the great-grandfather of her second cousin, Baroness Meral Hussein-Ece. At 13, while living in Margate, Emin was raped; she later described such assaults as common for girls in the area and said she had “no memory of being a virgin,” citing multiple rapes as a young teenager. Her work is often examined in the context of childhood and adolescent abuse and sexual assault.

She studied fashion at Medway College of Design (1980–82), where she met expelled student Billy Childish and became involved with The Medway Poets. She and Childish were a couple until 1987, and she administered his small press, Hangman Books, which published his confessional poetry. From 1983 to 1986, she studied printmaking at Maidstone Art College, earning a first-class degree. There she encountered Roberto Navickas (also spelled Navikas), whose name later appeared in her tent artwork, though she misspelled it by dropping a “C”; Navickas later used this error in two of his own works. In a 1995 interview, when asked who had the greatest influence on her life, Emin replied it was not a person but the time at Maidstone Art College, living by the River Medway and hanging around with Billy Childish. In 1987, she moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, earning an MA in painting in 1989. After graduation, two traumatic abortions led her to destroy all her graduate art, a period she called “emotional suicide.” One surviving painting from that time, *Friendship*, is in the Royal College of Art’s collection. Her influences include Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, and she briefly studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.

On 3 January 1993, Emin and fellow artist Sarah Lucas opened The Shop at 103 Bethnal Green Road in Bethnal Green, selling their own works, including T-shirts and ashtrays with Damien Hirst’s picture on the bottom. The space also had a life-drawing room and studio. Lucas funded it with money from Charles Saatchi. The Shop closed after six months with Emin’s 30th birthday party, titled “Fuckin’ Fantastic at 30 and Just About Old Enough to Do Whatever She Wants.” After closing, Emin burned everything left from The Shop in gallerist Carl Freedman’s garden, and the ashes were shown at her first solo exhibition, *My Major Retrospective*, at White Cube in November 1993. That show was autobiographical, featuring personal photographs, photos of her destroyed early paintings, and other items.

In 1997, Emin’s work *Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995*—a tent appliquéd with the names of everyone she had ever slept with—was displayed at Charles Saatchi’s *Sensation* exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. That same year, she gained media attention when she appeared drunk and swore repeatedly on a live TV discussion program called *The Death of Painting*. In 1999, she had her first U.S. solo exhibition, *Every Part of Me’s Bleeding*, at Lehmann Maupin Gallery. Later that year, she was nominated for the Turner Prize and exhibited *My Bed*, a readymade installation of her own unmade, dirty bed, where she had spent weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping, and having sex during a period of emotional turmoil. The piece included used condoms and blood-stained underwear.

Emin has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2010), the Royal Academy of Arts (2008), and Tate Britain (2005) on creativity, autobiography, and the role of personal history in art. In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy, becoming—along with Fiona Rae—one of the first two female professors since the Academy’s founding in 1768. Once called the “enfant terrible” of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, she was elected a Royal Academician in 2016. She lived in Spitalfields, East London, before returning to Margate, where she funds TKE Studios, providing workspace for aspiring artists.