![]() ![]() ![]() However, the artist has never been afraid of confronting the past, and now, 40 years later, she is back with plans to help transform the town into an artists’ enclave - her legacy to the place where she grew up. She wrote bitter-sweet accounts of endless summers of swimming, ‘listening to Buddy Holly and the Beach Boys, wearing star-spangled plimsolls, watching The Banana Splits’, but also told of encounters and experiences that were sometimes traumatic. In her autobiography Strangeland, written in 2005, Emin recalled both the beauty and the challenges of growing up in a ‘derelict seaside town’. Although she left the Kent coastal resort in 1982 to study at Maidstone College of Art and then the Royal College of Art in London, Margate remained integral to her work, emerging in paintings, poems and installations in all its tarnished glory. That future, the artist decided, would be in Margate, the childhood home she has written and spoken about so movingly in the past. ‘I wasn’t supposed to survive,’ she says. The surgery Emin underwent saved her life. I realised I was alive.’ As she says in the short film above, the paintings she made in those first few weeks were ‘like an explosion’. When the artist was finally able to pick up a paintbrush again, there was an outpouring of emotion: ‘It was fantastic. ‘I couldn’t hold a tea tray, I couldn’t pour a pot of tea, I couldn’t move a chair, let alone move my canvases around or paint. And, for once, she's keeping it to herself.For the first six months following Tracey Emin’s treatment for bladder cancer, she couldn’t paint. By the end of Strangeland, we are no closer to understanding the extraordinary metamorphosis which transformed the abused little girl from Margate into one of the art world's brightest stars. When did she turn to it and why? There is a fleeting mention of the 'emotional suicide' she suffered in 1992, when she destroyed all her paintings and started producing the confessional art which made her name.īut the events which prompted her breakdown, and inspired her creative rebirth, remain a mystery. Her art, for a start, is hardly touched on. For one so open and confessional, there are some glaring omissions. At its best, it shows flashes of insight and originality: 'As we drove from the sea, the land became a rolling mass of drunken hills.' But the most interesting thing about this book is what it doesn't tell us about Tracey Emin. The quality of Emin's writing is another nice surprise. But after the uneasy squalor of her childhood in Margate, it comes as a relief. ![]() It ain't very rock'n'roll - they pick olives, go to the seaside and exchange family gossip. The middle section of the book takes place in Turkey, where she finds some kind of peace exploring her roots and bonding with her estranged father. While her best-known art has shown Emin at her most confrontational, in her writing, we meet a calmer, more sensitive soul. And it describes, movingly, how she was left holding a dead foetus in the back of a London taxi five days after her botched abortion.īut the real revelations here are of a gentler kind. It details with some relish her stinking flat, her alcoholism and her wanking habits. It follows her down the dark alley where she was raped, aged 13. Those who do want more detail on all the best-known Emin myths won't be disappointed by Strangeland. How much more do we want or need to know? Even her grubby sheets have been on display at the Tate. She has made exhibitions out of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, her abortion and her darkest feelings of loss, self-doubt and betrayal. ![]()
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