Fortnight of Tears

I was fortunate enough to visit Tracey Emin's – Fortnight of Tears at the White Cube

in Bermondsey.

Known for her provocative and controversial pieces Tracey doesn't fail to impress.

In this show she tackles her life, pains, her feelings of being single, being female, childless and motherless. Emin’s anxiety of aging, her relationships and her inability to sleep.

Tracey Emin, A Fortnight of Tears, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 71”x71”

As I enter the gallery, I am first confronted with a short passage of text on the wall describing Emin’s tormented views on insomnia: the feeling of dying slowly while lying awake; likening her wakeful times as being in ‘a wooden box’, listening to the ‘noises of the death cart’ (as she imagined the street sounds outside to be) as she is woken up each night.’

This text gives an insight into Emin’s experience with her on going insomnia and as I walk into the South Gallery I, I am blasted by fifty, 70”inch, double-hung self-portraits in different intimate close-ups of her sleepless nights. These massive photographs containing her tired eyes and larger than life exhaustion dominate the room. I walk silently around gazing at these ‘Sleep deprived Selfies’ and Emin’s tired and frustrated portraits stare back.

The ‘9x9x9’ room holds the first of Emin’s powerful sculptures The Mother(2017). A large bronze nude kneels in the dimly lit room, gazing into the empty place of her cradled arms. This sculpture originally commission for a Norwegian museum reflects Emin’s view on vulnerability, it holds a pureness about it but also a sense of loss. Is this a reference to her abortion and inability to have children? At first my feelings are of love and maybe of religion and faith but after some thought into Emin’s past the piece fills me with sadness.

Emin’s other large bronze sculpturesI Lay Here For You (2018) and When I Sleep(2018) dominate in the South Gallery II. Both pieces lie face down, drawing upon the classical imagery of the reclining nude. Their bodies contorted and curled in vulnerable, sexual poses. Emin’s exploration of sculpture through the figure emulates the works of Egon Schiele, one of Emin’s biggest inspirations. The influence of Schiele’s figures, which contort with fibrous, elongated limbs; stretch out in front of the viewer.These pieces lie uncomfortably with elongated legs, twisted in moments of fear and pleasure, they seem almost malleable, despite the Bronze solidity.

The Ashes Room opposite contains work, which is very much still raw in Emin’s life, the passing of her mother in 2016. Paintings and sketches reflect her bereavement and loss, one that stands out is I Was Too Young To Be Carrying YourAshes(2017-18) This is a self portrait of Emin, clutching her mothers remains in a wooden box, this painting contains broad brushstrokes of red and black, conveying the pain of losing someone so loved.

A short but powerful film which accompanies the paintings, The Ashes (2018) is of a simple camera, slowly panning across a table, revealing the box containing her mother’s ashes, enveloped by ethereal sunlight; simple but poignant.

Her paintings throughout the exhibition give the viewer a sense of Emin’s inner struggles, her sexual relationships and encounters; infatuation to abuse.

What Emin draws from her art is based on her body,which is one of her strongest forms of expression and her raw emotion and energies are plastered over canvas’s in a storyboard of her life’s sufferings. Her figurative works show feelings of frustration, self-reflection and pain, turmoil of reds and blacks dripping from scratchy pink and white tones, which echo elements of Cy Twombly’s large, scaled abstract scribbles and his similar smeared tones on raw canvas and linen.

The endnote of the exhibition is an older film made in 1996. How It Feels ’is a documentary of Tracey, walking through the London streets and explaining her harrowing experience of her first abortion at the age of 18. Listening to Emin’s ordeal and seeing how broken she feels, I can’t help but learn to appreciate how these chapters have moved her to create her art.

I feel this exhibition is intensely personal, revealing intimate details of Emin’s life with brutal honesty and poetic humour and no matter what your view is of Tracey Emin’s work, sometimes you need to appreciate her rawness so that you appreciate Emin, as Emin is her art.