‘To be totally the focus of someone, who was really into sex, was fantastic’: Tracey Emin and Billy Childish on their blazing romance
Never was a couple so combustible, but their relationship in the 80s would influence their entire life’s work. In an extract from a new biography of Childish, the pair, who are somehow still friends, give their side of the story
As told to Ted Kessler
Wednesday 3 July 2024
Bill Lewis – Billy Childish’s great friend and collaborator in the Medway Poets and other endeavours since 1978 – says that Tracey Emin and Billy Childish are two people who should never have been together, romantically. You will not find anybody who knows either who disagrees with this assessment. And yet, Billy Childish and Tracey Emin were romantically together between 1982 and 1985.
Tracey Emin at St John Bread and Wine, Spitalfields, London. Photograph: Harry Borden
LIFE ON A PLATE
Interview
Tracey Emin: 'I was on 100 oysters a week'
The artists tells of her food fantasies and raiding the fridge as a child
John Hind
Sunday 18 April 2010
Sleeping under a dinner table is safe and snug. I picked it up as a child. As a young artist, at a big dinner, sometimes I'd get so tired I'd think, "If I just snooze for half an hour I'll be fine", and I'd slide underneath. More recently I don't, because my absence would be too noticeable.
Installation view of Tracey Emin's show A Fortnight of Tears at White Cube Bermondsey, London
Tracey Emin to turn Margate studio into a museum for her work when she dies
British artist is returning to the seaside town where she grew up and plans to establish a foundation there
Anny Shaw 8th February 2019
Now she is in the third and final part of her life, as she calls it, Tracey Emin’s thoughts are turning to her legacy, she tells The Art Newspaper podcast. The British artist says she is planning to establish a foundation and turn the studio she is currently developing in the seaside town of Margate into a museum when she dies.
“We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans…” said Maya Angelou “…because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone- because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin… but who we are internally… perhaps even spiritually. There’s something, which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.”
Tracey Emin and Jeremy Deller Take on Boris and his Brexit
Over 300 high-profile cultural figures from across Britain have signed a petition voicing their concerns about leaving the European Union. Notable artists including Anish Kapoor, Jeremy Deller, Martin Paar, and Cornelia Parker have each signed the petition.
Tracey Emin at her exhibition Tracey Emin My Bed/JMW Turner at Turner Contemporary, Margate. Image: Stephen White. Courtesy: Turner Contemporary
Tracey Emin’s My Bed—A Glimpse into the Debased Lifestyle of a Despairing Artist
Still filthy, still repulsive, and still one of the most moving works of contemporary art, Tracey Emin’s My Bed, 1998 gave us a delicious glimpse into the lifestyle of a despairing 35-year old artist. The crumpled bed sheets still seemingly ooze with her bodily secretions, the blood stain from her period clearly visible to all onlookers. When it was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 (shockingly it didn’t win), the work provoked such a media frenzy that the Tate’s visitor numbers were at an all-time record high.
The artist analyses her close connection with Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler, from rule-breaking ad campaigns to custom-fit haute couture
OCTOBER 02, 2017 INTERVIEW Sophie Bew
Finding fellow mavericks in Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler, artist Tracey Emin began a close relationship with the original punk brand. From ad hoc ad campaigns shot with then boyfriend and artist Mat Collishaw, to modelling on Westwood’s catwalk and wearing the label's custom-fit haute couture, she has publically explored the irreverence shared by her own work and that of the designers. A 30-page portfolio in AnOther Magazine Autumn/Winter 2017 examines the impact of pioneers Westwood and Kronthaler, and would be incomplete without the voices of their key collaborators. This talk with Tracey Emin is one of a series of discussions outlining the curious and colourful world of Westwood.
‘I thought I had six months to live’ / Self-portrait, November 2020 Tracey Emin after her treatment. Photograph: Courtesy of the Artist
Interview
Tracey Emin on her cancer: 'I will find love. I will have exhibitions. I will enjoy my life. I will'
As she recovers from a brutal summer of cancer treatment, Tracey Emin takes us round her new show – and imagines spending the next 30 years painting in her pyjamas to the sound of birdsong
Stuart Jeffries Monday 9 November 2020
‘I am so lucky,” says Tracey Emin as we stand in the grand galleries of the Royal Academy. I can tell, from her brown eyes, that she’s smiling beneath her face mask. As we roam rooms painted moody blue for her new exhibition, in which her paintings, bronzes and neons are juxtaposed with the oils and watercolours of Edvard Munch, Emin adjusts her stoma bag occasionally and laughs a lot. “I’m in love with Munch,” she says. “Not with the art, but with the man. I have been since I was 18.”
Dorothea Tanning; Tracey Emin review – from the sublime to the miserabilist
Tate Modern; White Cube Bermondsey, London A show full of surprises reveals Dorothea Tanning as so much more than the last surrealist, while Tracey Emin delivers a monotone lament in 100 works
Astartling painting in this terrific survey of the American artist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) shows dinner time in some conventional midwestern home. The paterfamilias, with blinding spectacles and a hideous orange tie, towers above the proceedings. His daughter is much smaller; tinier still is a cook bearing a dish, who is not much bigger than the family dog. Each is portrayed according to their power. The daughter shoots us an urgent glance: home life really is as bad as it looks.
Once called the “enfant terrible” of the Young British Artists
Once called the “enfant terrible” of the Young British Artists, Tracey Emin’s confessional, autobiographical work fearlessly intimates that the artist is here to stay.
Interview by Sarah Nicole Prickett
In a beautiful new compendium entitled TRACEY EMIN: WORKS 2007-2017 by: Jonathan Jones, published by Rizzoli International Publications, we can view a decade’s worth of work of the prolific and inimitable Tracey Emin. Compiled in close collaboration with the artist and unprecedented in its scope, this definitive book collects ten years of Tracey Emin’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, appliques and embroideries, neons, video stills, and installations. A multimedia artist whose intensely personal work blurs the boundaries between art and life, Emin remains one of the most highly publicized contemporary British artists and continues to stir as much controversy as she has acclaim. A multimedia artist whose intensely personal work blurs the boundaries between art and life, Emin remains one of the most highly publicized contemporary British artists and continues to stir as much controversy as she has acclaim.
Self-Portrait With Charlie (1995) by David Hockney. Photograph: David Hockney
The top 10 self-portraits in art
From an anxious Lucian Freud to an enigmatic Rembrandt and a noirish Cindy Sherman, these self-portraits take the selfie to a new artistic level
Jonathan Jones Thursday 4 September 2014 14.23 BST
David Hockney – Self-Portrait With Charlie (1995)
Hockney is ruthless in his self-portraits; he never poses or tries to look good. What he does is to record the act of self-portraiture – the fact of a painter looking in a mirror and trying to record what he sees – and give it a deliberately awkward material truth. In doing so, he paints the ideal of honest observation.
Parmigianino – Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c 1524)
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c 1524) by Parmigianino. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images
It's not only modern artists who portray themselves in thought-provoking ways. In the early 16th-century, Parmigianino looked at himself in a convex mirror and painted his distorted reflection, his huge hand close to the surface of the picture, his face the focus of a selfie-like bubble image, in which time and space warp vertiginously. This precocious painting is the theme of John Ashbery's great poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
Pablo Picasso – Self-Portrait Facing Death (1972)
Picasso always portrayed himself with big eyes that seem to swallow up the beholder, insisting, even as he turns himself into a painted object, that it is he, not you, who does the looking. Those eyes were never bigger – or braver – than in this unillusioned, atheist painting of the artist battered by time and recognising the nearness of his own mortality.
There isn't a museum in the world that isn't trying to get their hands on her work, yet Louise Bourgeois hasn't become a mainstream artist
Tracey Emin
The Guardian, Friday 28 June 2013
Louise Bourgeois in her Brooklyn studio. Photograph: Claudio Edinger/Corbis Saba
I first heard about Louise Bourgeois in 1995 when she was shown at the Tate. The curator, Stuart Morgan, always used to say to me that I'd like his friend who lived in New York, and the way he talked about her and her art made me think she was someone of my age. So I was quite shocked when I found out she was in her 80s. I was already making work about personal experiences, but Louise was doing it on a different level and, while her work appears to be very emotional, it is also highly intellectual. Even though she was passionate and romantic, she was also very academic and could have been anything – a scientist, a mathematician – but she chose to do art.
I met her towards the end of her life and we collaborated. She was formidable and I was quite in awe of her presence, her stamina and her attitude. But we got on really well, and it felt empowering just to know someone like that. In Manchester, I am taking part in the 20th anniversary of the critic Hans Ulrich Obrist's "Do it" project in which artists respond to the instructions of artists from an earlier generation. My partner is Louise and I'll be responding to her idea that people should just go out on the street and "smile at a stranger". In response, I've written a poem that will be given to people to take away with them.
Although today there is not a museum in the world that isn't trying to get their hands on her work, Louise hasn't become a mainstream artist. She is still out there in her own orbit. When we collaborated I was obviously interested in the work we were doing, but I had no idea of what she was actually giving me. The repercussions – in terms of people met and friendships made – changed my life, which is something you don't expect when you meet someone. It has been a really lovely thing.