Tracey Emin

I occasionally write reviews of things for a local mag - for free - and this is my latest review of the Tracey Emin exhibition at Turner Contemporary. 

Warning this review contains sexual imagery!

She lay down beneath the Sea: Tracey Emin at Turner Contemporary

This exhibition of Tracey Emin’s work will provoke a range of personal responses.  The aesthetic qualities of her work, the “how would this look in the sitting room?” question, may not be uppermost in many visitors’ minds. Those looking for a Margate element in the work will look in vain. 

So what do we have?   The first room of the exhibition consists chiefly of a series of blue ink drawings of a naked woman in an identical position, with one knee drawn up – suggestive of masturbation.  There are a number of different titles – proclaiming her feelings of loss, longing for love, hurt.  Along with these are some similar images which she has created in blue threads on calico. Looking at these as a fellow human one finds a sorrowful exhibition of vulnerability, a continuation of Emin’s openness about her sexual/emotional experiences in her art.  Looking at them as works of art, I found them disappointing.  She has recently become a professor of drawing – obviously she has a fluidity of line when it comes to this topic – but there is a sense of them having been dashed off rapidly.   For this reason alone one has more respect for the embroidered pieces, which she worked herself, a time-consuming process (please don’t tell me she used a machine!)  The embroidery style using satin stitch, sometimes in contrasting blues or black, is a simple technique that probably pre-dates the Bayeux Tapestry: here a traditional female craft is used to convey female angst, rather than the more traditional domestic images.

 The sketchiness, the casualness of her drawings seem redolent of the unhappiness, or perhaps she did them when she was drunk – they have that sort of scrappy feeling.  As someone who has tried to write when drunk I recognise the product of a similar urge to get something down, something important, married with a diminished technical ability.  Unfortunately my inebriated jottings don’t have much market value.

Three drawings, echoing Picasso’s female portraits, Beautiful Reflection show a woman with misplaced eyes.  To me this said something of the way a woman, perhaps particularly a woman artist, has to contort or distort herself to be acceptable, and that she doesn’t get to age like Picasso – pulling birds and engendering children in old age. 

In the second room four tapestries focus again on sex and female genitalia.  They are incredibly clever, the use of colour is subtle, and the Mystic Rose uses pink to excellent effect – suddenly you see the rose/vulva connection as never before... Again there is the subversion of tapestry – used by nice ladies to make cushion covers with flowers and butterflies on, to show us a totally different aspect of femininity.  Every nice lady who ever stitched a draught excluder or a firescreen had a vagina as well: no, it’s not surprising, but it’s seldom mentioned.

Seeing Rodin’s sketches of nudes in the midst of this was a shock.  Whatever you feel about Emin’s nudes, they lack erotic/titillating qualities – their starkness contrasts with Rodin’s male gaze and the deliberate way he’s posed his models.  Turner’s sketches of nude women have an almost apologetic quality, not fully realised, adolescent or furtive perhaps.  Seeing these Emin’s nudes seem more vital and expressive.

Her sculptural/installation pieces are less successful I think – having read an article in which she discusses her current work in the context of her menopause, I didn’t really see much of a connection (despite my own expertise in this field) – except perhaps that stark dead, leafless olive branch on the stained mattress.  I couldn’t help wondering why the centre of the mattress was so clean and the staining around the outside – the symbolism (if any) escaped me.

She lay down beneath the Sea provoked plenty of thought and discussion, which is what one hopes for from art that one doesn’t find aesthetically pleasing.  But perhaps, on reflection, I’d rather like one of those four large tapestries for my sitting room wall.