Tracey Emin: 'Your skin goes baggy and your muscles collapse. If I could change anything, it's that'

Tracey Emin doesn’t think she is ageing gracefully, but after 20 years of hell-raising with the Young British Artists that’s to be expected. As she nurses her umpteenth hangover, Richard Godwin has a bedside chat with the artist whose work has never been more valuable. Warning: this article includes some vomiting
Art was my salvation. I'll still be making art from my deathbed': Tracey Emin (Picture: Ian Derry)
Richard Godwin25 April 2014

Poor Tracey Emin is feeling the worse for wear. Within a few minutes of turning up at her studio, Britain’s most celebrated female artist tells me to ‘expect monosyllables’. Then she disappears into an attic room — and I’m pretty sure I can hear weeping through the door. When I summon up the courage to enter, I am greeted by a contemporary update of her seminal work My Bed (1998), remade as a tableau vivant, with Emin reclining at the centre of it, in a pool of white light. ‘Pull up a chair, you can be my doctor,’ she bleats. Apparently, she was out until 4am drinking white wine with the Hong Kong billionaire David Tang. ‘I’m feeling terrible.’ And then I have to leave again, so that she can be sick. ‘Urgh… Oh... GOD!’

I had thought that, at 50, she had grown out of this sort of thing. Back in the 1990s, Emin was fêted as much for her social life as for bruised, confessional works such as said dishevelled bed (now in Charles Saatchi’s house) and her tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (consumed by fire in 2004). However, while many of her fellow Young British Artists are now ‘dead, retarded or senile’ (as Jake Chapman once put it), Emin has remained prolific: she was elected to the Royal Academy in 2007, the same year that she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale; in 2011, she opened the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, where she grew up in poverty with her mother and brother after her father’s hotel business failed and he abandoned them; one of her neons, More Passion, adorns David Cameron’s wall; she starred in last season’s M&S advert. It’s all very respectable and, considering her destitute beginnings, testament to the transformative power of art.

Still, I hadn’t quite got a sense of how successful Emin is until I explored her studio (there was quite a bit of time to do so). In the basement, there is a Victorian-tiled single-lane swimming pool. On the first floor are the offices of Emin International, where limited-edition prints are reproduced and posted around the world by seven full-time staff. I am just admiring one of Emin’s appliqué kittens when I hear ‘Richard! Richard! It’s over!’ I re-enter the room. ‘Oh, I’ve just thought! You’re going to have me vomiting on tape!’

She admits that I’ve caught her on an ‘interesting day’ — and actually, between the waves of nausea, she proves rather profound, and happy to answer all questions from taxation to masturbation. Emin courted the disdain of the art world by coming out in support of Cameron and complaining about the 50p tax rate — but while her love of Cameron is sincere, she insists that her remarks were taken out of context, and she’s proud to pay tax. As for masturbation: ‘The irony is, when you live on your own, you wank very seldom,’ she explains. ‘Because it’s all you have. So it’s not an escape — it’s a prison.’ I’d never thought of it like that.

We’re supposed to be talking about the perfume bottle she has just designed for her dear friends Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the co-directors of the Serpentine

Gallery, who have commissioned a bespoke scent from the peerless perfumers at Comme des Garçons. ‘Julia and Hans are art superstars. Whatever they ask me to do, I just say, yeah, sure,’ she explains. The bottle is decorated with a drawing of her new sculpture, The Heart Has Its Reasons, which depicts Cupid and Psyche in bronze, a new material for her. She has been experimenting at a foundry in New York and will unveil the first results at the Serpentine before a major new exhibition at White Cube in Bermondsey later this year. We’ll have to wait until we get to smell Eau de Tracey, sadly. ‘At the moment, it wouldn’t smell particularly good. Someone in the street just stopped me and said I was a really lovely woman. I said: “Not today.” ’

It strikes her as a delicious irony that she is due to appear in a health and beauty special. ‘My health isn’t particularly brilliant and my beauty isn’t good,’ she elaborates. Healthwise, she’s not as conscientious as she was: ‘When I was younger, for ten years I swam a kilometre a day. And I cycled everywhere to keep my legs good. I’m friends with Joan Collins. She always says, “You can change whatever you like about your appearance but you can’t change your legs.” She’s got brilliant legs.’

As for her own beauty, she recently saw a picture from 17 years ago and didn’t recognise herself: ‘When I was 42, overnight I got grey skin,’ she says. ‘It really scared me. At a certain point, your skin goes baggy and your muscles collapse. If I could change anything, that’s what it would be.’ She is not afraid of depicting herself, though, because that is different. ‘It’s internal. I’m giving it; it’s not being taken from me.’

Still, externally, despite looking a bit tired, Emin seems fine to me. She insists she doesn’t drink that often. She gave up smoking ten years ago — she was a 60-a-day girl back in the late 1990s — and the only cigarette she has smoked since was in a dream.

‘If I’m not out drinking with Tang till 4am, I’m usually in bed by eight or nine. If I don’t get eight hours’ sleep, I need to catch up in the day, hence I’m lying down now. I’m so tired!’ She can’t understand how they ever got round to making any art in the 1990s. If the years have taught her anything, it’s that time is precious. She is having a house built over the road, designed by David Chipperfield. ‘I think that’s when things will really change for me,’ she says — which strikes me as odd. She’s had so much success, I can’t imagine what she’d want to change about her current set-up.

‘The success is doing what you do, not what you achieve from it. I still pinch myself, I won’t let myself forget how all of this happened: it’s through my art. That’s where I get most satisfaction and the most pleasure,’ she says. ‘Being an artist is like having a vocation. It’s a religion. If someone were to take art away from me, I’d die. For me, art was my salvation. It saves me.’ All she wants in life is more time to do her work. ‘I would love to be able to wake up, not have to have a shower or get dressed, and just start working in my pyjamas. When I’ve got the energy to work, I just want to work.’

She is having a lift installed in her new house. ‘That way, if I get really old and I can’t walk or I’m in a wheelchair, I’ll still be able to work. A lot of people can’t work because they can’t walk. But if you’re an artist, you do your work with your mind. Right now, I’m obviously not feeling physically brilliant but my mind is still there. That’s what it will be like when I’m old. I’ll still be making art from my deathbed, until the day I die.’

While many of her contempor-aries are slowing down, it’s almost as if Emin is speeding up. ‘Well, I am, because I’m doing less of the other stuff,’ she says. ‘Now, I’m kind of catching up with myself. When I was younger, it was like a fight — I was trying to sort out all this cathartic angst. It’s more like I’m in tune with my work now. It doesn’t overwhelm me. I could never make the Bed or the Tent now. Well, I couldn’t make the Tent because I haven’t slept with anyone for years! But look at any other artist’s work over 20 years — if you don’t see change, there’s something wrong.’ The economic recovery has also been favourable to Emin’s stock: in the past two years, her four-poster bed To Meet My Past, the embroidered blanket Super Drunk Bitch and appliquéd blanket Terminal One sold for a combined £1 million.

She says that after years bemoaning her own singledom, she is not now looking for love — and is at peace with being on her own. ‘I’m more cool with it than not cool with it, if that makes sense.’ She has been typically open in the past about the effects of the menopause. However, when I ask what has changed, she says it is simply the realisation of how strong her friendships are, and that they wouldn’t be that way if she was in a relationship. ‘I realise that I rely and depend upon the love of my close friends a lot.’ Her close friends include Vivienne Westwood, Bob Dylan and Kate Moss. ‘If I were with someone, these relationships would not be so strong. I give a lot in my friendships. I’d rather have that than be with someone. I like it the way it is.’

She has no regrets about not having children: ‘No! I obviously do not, do I? On Mother’s Day, I had a massive bouquet of flowers from my cat and that meant a lot to me. There are certain times that you’re made to feel ostracised by society, or like a demon witch. That’s more upsetting than never having children, because that’s my choice.’

I wonder how far her thoughts on ageing have been informed by her friendship with the late Louise Bourgeois. They collaborated on a series of drawings that were among the French artist’s last works before she died in 2010. ‘She’s the oldest person I’ve ever met,’ says Emin. ‘She was 98 when she died. She became an entity, not a person. A spirit of sorts. She would see things that we couldn’t. When you’re that age, you see into parallel worlds. It’s like Yoda from Star Wars.’

How many years away is Emin from becoming an entity? ‘The way I feel today, maybe one! But I’m planning for it. That’s another thing about single people. We don’t plan for the future. People in couples make plans — where to move, where to go on holiday. Being single, you can suffer from inertia because there’s no one to help you make decisions.’ But we’ve only begun to broach the subject of her legacy when she gives a little plea of distress. ‘Oh, I’m gonna be sick again…’

This time I take the Dictaphone with me. But as Emin lets it all out, I realise there’s a generosity that underpins all this. ‘A lot of people would have cancelled this,’ she explains as we say goodbye. ‘They would say I’m unprofessional being in this situation — but it’s actually the complete opposite.’ She’s quite right.

Serpentine is available at The Serpentine Galleries, Dover Street Market and Comme des Garçons Perfume Shop from 28 April, priced at £56

Photography by Ian Derry

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