Tracey Emin: She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea, Turner Contemporary Margate - review

While torment clearly lies beneath, Margate's most famous daughter seems to have let go of the usual tales of trauma, opening this show with a serenity befitting it's glorious location
28 May 2012

The homecoming of Margate’s most famous daughter could have been harrowing. But rather than raking over her now-familiar tales of teenage rape and promiscuity by the sea, Tracey Emin begins this show with serenity. Turner Contemporary’s wonderful galleries bathe art in glorious daylight, and in response Emin has created a rhapsody in blue on white, with a series of gouache drawings and embroideries on calico.

Closer up, you see that torment lies beneath the overall calm. While some drawings featuring that infamous Emin motif, the bed, suggest cosy domesticity, many feature a lone, naked, prostrate figure, often masturbating and sketched with typical Emin brevity, accompanied by plaintive scrawls — “I’m telling you it HURT”, says one. Elsewhere, sculptures are dotted around — crudely fashioned figurative lumps on wooden plinths and more successful combinations of found objects, like a branch cast in bronze lying on a filthy stained mattress, which conveys loneliness better than many of the drawings.

Emin is increasingly looking to the art of the past, in mini homages to Picasso’ s garlanded Mediterranean goddesses and in showing the sketchy erotica of Turner and Rodin alongside some of her own watercolours. But the comparison exposes a puzzling flaw, in that Emin goes to great lengths to disguise her drawing skills. There are glimpses of delicacy but she is so wedded to raw expression that it seems she fears diluting the works’ power by taking more care over them. That, to me, reads as an affectation. Likewise her spelling — would asking someone how to spell Picasso (she writes it Picaso) really diminish the authenticity of her voice?

When Emin is more measured, in scaling up her drawings into elegant appliqué, she produces her best work. The meditative act of sewing gives a greater sense of design, without diminishing the emotion.

Runs until September 23 (01843 233000, turnercontemporary.org).

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