Tracey Emin: ‘Where does that girl go? Where does that youth go?’

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/28/tracey-emin-interview-rachel-cooke

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Tracey Emin perches in her Spitalfields studio, sipping tea rather self-consciously from an old-fashioned bone-china cup. Nine parts Steptoe and Son to one part Cath Kidston, the cavernous space in which we’re sitting is everything you would want a 21st-century artist’s studio to be – around us is a picturesque clutter of trinkets and statues, nursery and garden furniture, brushes and oil – and I suspect she knows that she looks good against it. But the word “studio”, which even in the age of the art-crazed oligarch still manages to conjure draughts and fingerless gloves, is also, in this instance, a little misleading. This is only one small corner of Emin’s vast London HQ, named Tenter Ground for the Huguenot weaving factory it once housed (a tenter is the frame on which fabric was hung to dry).

A tour I took earlier began with a visit to a lavender-bedecked roof terrace with 360-degree views and climaxed with a glimpse of a basement swimming pool so exquisite it might have come straight out of a St James’s gentlemen’s club. Having bought the building for £4m, and spent God knows how much on restoring it, Emin has ended up with something that feels more like a boutique hotel for one than a paint-spattered den of creativity.

Not that she would see it this way. I have the impression that the set-up – indoor car parking, several assistants, underfloor heating, a sewing room, an archive, a kitchen, a freshly made double bed into which she can dive at any time – feels very necessary to her: a comfort, yes, but also a highly visible statement of her success. And while this is not her favourite studio – that would be the one at her home in St Tropez, which looks out on to a lake and is very “pretty and sweet” – she gets a lot done here.

“I start early, at about eight, and I work until 11.30 at night,” she says. “I hate being interrupted. I get resentful about it. Work is good. If I don’t make things, I become ill and depressed. Painting makes me feel like a better human being. It’s what I’m supposed to be doing.” So she’s able to lose herself in her work, even with all the distractions available to her? “No.” She throws me what will turn out to be the first of several frustrated looks. “The kind of work I do, you’re not going to lose yourself. You’re going to be digging yourself up.”

Emin’s new show – it opens at White Cube next month – is called The Last Great Adventure is You, and will include 50 new works: small paintings, huge embroideries, a series of handbag-sized bronzes. And yes, it does seem mostly to be another excavation of the artist herself. There is a study of a lion and another of a lamb; also a tiny grotto, a lonely figure marooned inside it (“Grottoes are places of extreme fecundity and romance,” she’ll tell me later).

In the main, though, what you see, over and over, is the outline of a female body: hips and thighs, ankles and breasts. Sometimes this figure is bold and outsized, stitched in black silk on wide expanses of hessian. At others, it’s tiny and elusive: a dash of paint on paper. But inescapably, it’s always hers. You know in your gut that these are self-portraits, and the compulsion involved in such repetition and reworking repels as much as it transfixes, which is perhaps what gives her work, for those who admire it, its particular power.

What is she trying to get at when she draws those curved lines? What is it that leads her to do this again and again? “I’m trying to work out why my body has changed so much,” she says in her high and surprisingly prim voice. “I’ve gone from being a really thin girl – even when I was 40, I was thin – to becoming matronly and womanly. I’m trying to come to terms with the physical changes. There’s a big difference between being 35 and 50. Massive.

“And that’s what I’m trying to understand. Where does that girl go? Where does that youth go? That thing that’s lost, where has it gone? I’m looking for it in the pictures; I’m looking for it in the paintbrush.”

Is she one of those women who has a terrible shock when she catches sight of herself in a shop window? “Oh, let’s just use the word ‘mirror’. No, I don’t like what I see. But it’s not just about that. I’m talking about how things feel. As you get older, life feels heavier, more cumbersome. Things get harder to carry around, literally and spiritually.”

Anticipating what I’m about to say – my mouth is already open; the consoling, indignant words have already formed in my brain – she almost shouts: “And no, it’s got nothing to do with happiness or success! I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a kind of… breathlessness. I’m talking about the truth. I’m dealing with that, and no matter how petty or unimportant it may seem to some people, being a woman, alone, 51, going into the third phase of my life, I need to know why it’s like this. How do you stop the heaviness?”

The show has no narrative, or so she insists. But she has written three stories for the catalogue based on items she read in the newspapers. One is about a guy who got lost inside a sink hole; another is about a woman whose husband disappeared in the Dolomites, only for his perfectly preserved body to be discovered 60 years later; and the third is about a woman whose pet snake, according to its vet, was preparing to eat her (she woke up in bed and found it lying next to her, stretched out, measuring her up). “They’re about love and extremity,” she says fiercely. “But in the end we’re on our own, and that’s the end of it.”

Does it get easier, putting on a show? Is she any less nervous now than she used to be? “No. Before the opening, I’ll be feeling physically sick, and I will have a massive fat attack. I won’t want to go because I’m so nervous. Especially in London. It’s home. People can come up to you in the street and tell you what they think. I wish I could shrug it off, but I can’t because I believe so much in what I do. As I get older, my art is what drives me, and it will till the end of my life. So how people react really matters.”

Emin doesn’t believe artists who say they don’t read their reviews. In her case, the criticism is often exactingly personal. How could it not be, given the autobiographical element of her work? “But they still wouldn’t do it to a man,” she says.

The world of culture, according to Emin, continues to be unforgivably snobbish and class based. “The other day a programme came on Radio 4 that really upset me. It was called Recycled Radio. They’d made a comedy programme out of old clips, all of them taken out of context. This one was about art. It was awful. You don’t do Desert Island Discs to have it mashed up and made into a national joke.”

On the other hand, “brilliant” things do happen. “Like My Bed selling [the 1998 installation, owned by Charles Saatchi, was auctioned last July for £2.2m]. On the day, I felt sick. I was going to go to France, but that would have been running away, and once I was there I felt absolutely fine. What I liked about the sale was how seriously people were taking it, calling it a national treasure and saying it must not leave the country [it was bought by a German collector, who is to loan it to the Tate]. That was pretty great. And when the hammer went down, I felt really happy. Not for me, but for the bed. I was trying to protect the bed. When you think what that bed’s done for me…”

Her voice is intense, almost deranged with sincerity and pride. “I was exhausted afterwards. I wanted to sleep for days and days.”

Emin’s story is well-rehearsed, not least by her. Until she was seven, she lived in a Margate hotel owned by her Turkish-Cypriot father, who kept another family elsewhere. But then he went bust and she and her mother, Pam, and her twin, Paul, found themselves down on their luck. Tracey and Paul were often left in the care of their grandmother while Pam was away working, and by the time they were teenagers they were wild. He was into drugs; she was into drink and sex.

Lately, Emin tells me, she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about the Rotherham abuse scandal. It has brought a lot of her own stuff back to the surface (she was raped at the age of 13, an event she once described as “par for the course” for girls in her town). Margate, though, has slowly risen in her affections down the years, particularly since the opening of its pristine gallery, Turner Contemporary.

“I used to be enemy number one there, but now I’m everyone’s favourite girl. Margate’s population is only 40,000, but my show [in 2012] was seen by 175,000 people.” When she visits, she wanders the town in a kind of “nightmare dream state”. She relishes its growing gentrification, but her “teenage map” is indelible, impossible to erase.

Emin went to Maidstone College of Art, and then to the Royal College, after which she opened a shop with Sarah Lucas, where they sold things they made. Thanks to a letter she wrote to him in which she asked for £20 by way of an investment in her as an artist, Jay Jopling became her dealer, and she had her first show at his gallery, White Cube, in 1993 (starting as she meant to go on, she called it My Major Retrospective). In 1999 she was shortlisted for the Turner prize. Like many of the Young British Artists, she has been a fortunate recipient of the patronage of Charles Saatchi (it was Saatchi who owned her famous appliquéed tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, which was later destroyed in a fire at the Momart storage warehouse in east London). But she’s also, I think, exceptionally ambitious: a clever marketeer, even an entrepreneur of sorts (visit her website if you don’t believe me). You can almost feel her determination. It’s what makes talking to her so difficult. She’s apt to grow irritable if you take her at anything less than her own estimation. (“Haven’t you done your research?” she snaps at me at one point, a question that couldn’t be more unfair – for alas, I am an irredeemable swot.)

But again, she doesn’t see it this way at all. “I’ve never been ambitious in my life. Never, ever. People think I’m joking. ‘Christ,’ they say. ‘Look at all you’ve achieved.’ But no. It’s only now that I’m starting to be. A lot of people my age are jaded. I’m the opposite. A lot of men, their career peaks when they’re in their 40s. But women keep going. It’s the same as sex. Men have one big ejaculation, whereas women just keep coming and coming.”

All the same, she is the kind of reflexive Tory who’d rather die than admit to luck having played its part in her life. When I ask if she sometimes has to pinch herself (in addition to this place and St Tropez, she has an enviable 18th-century house up the road, as well as homes in Miami and New York), she shakes her head. “I worked for it, didn’t I? I recognised opportunities and I took them; I wasn’t afraid and I took risks.”

Does she feel she’s paid a price for her art? Perhaps. “I’ve been on my own now for four years. I’m used to it. I find it very hard to share my life with someone. That’s the reality of the situation.”

But she has no time for those who equate art and children, seeing the former as a substitute for the latter. “Having a child would be a substitute for my work! No one invites me to baby showers any more. I can’t join in. I don’t know anything about that world. I’m interested in this world I’ve created, not that world.”

It’s difficult, though, isn’t it, being a childless woman? People are suspicious, mean, patronising. “Yes. Four hundred years ago I’d have been burnt at the stake. But it’s how I grew up. My mum never wanted me to have children. When I was young, she did everything she could to stop me. I went on the pill at 14. For her, having a child would have been failure of the highest level. She wanted me to have an education. She never wanted me to go through the pain of childbirth. Even when I was in my 30s, she was still telling me why I couldn’t ever have children.”

She gazes at the wall opposite, where there hangs the family tree drawn up following her appearance on Who Do You Think You Are?. “Of course, it all makes sense now,” she says, a little wistfully. “We’re proper gypsies. Now we know why we don’t like staying in the same place, why we don’t like having children. In my family, women are the breadwinners.”

And then she turns back to me. “It’s like Descartes said: even when a candle melts, it’s still made of wax.”

She might well feel heavy and cumbersome; she might well be in deep mourning for her fugitive youth. But inside, you gather, there is still a part of her that is, and always will be, just another teenage girl from Margate.

The Last Great Adventure is You is at White Cube Bermondsey, 8 October to 16 November