Tracey Emin went from Britart provocateur to the Royal Academy's drawing professor
In 1999 Tracey Emin put her own unmade bed, stained sheets and all, into the Tate as a Turner Prize nominee. Twelve years later the Royal Academy made her Professor of Drawing, one of the first two women to hold a professorship there since its founding in 1768.
Emin was born in Croydon on 3 July 1963, the daughter of a Turkish Cypriot father and an English mother with Romanichal roots, and grew up in Margate with her twin brother Paul. She studied fashion at Medway College of Design, where she fell in with Billy Childish and the Medway Poets and ran his small press, Hangman Books. A first-class printmaking degree from Maidstone followed, then an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 1989. Afterwards she destroyed nearly everything she had made as a graduate student, calling that time emotional suicide; one surviving canvas, Friendship, belongs to the college.
In 1993 she and Sarah Lucas ran The Shop on Bethnal Green Road for six months, selling homemade goods such as ashtrays bearing Damien Hirst's face. When it closed, Emin burned the leftover stock and exhibited the ashes in My Major Retrospective, her first solo show at White Cube that November.
Her breakthrough piece was a blue tent stitched with the names of everyone she had ever shared a bed with, including relatives from childhood and her twin. Curator Carl Freedman had goaded her into working bigger for his 1995 show Minky Manky. Charles Saatchi bought it and showed it in Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997; a warehouse fire destroyed it in 2004, along with a Whitstable beach hut she had turned into art. That same year of Sensation she appeared drunk and swearing on a live Channel 4 debate about the Turner Prize, which made her a household name.
My Bed arrived in 1999, presented as it looked after days she spent in it feeling suicidal over a relationship. Two performance artists leapt onto it bare-chested to improve it. Collectors have included Elton John and George Michael, whose Dallas foundation opened with a tribute show of her work in 2007. Elected a Royal Academician in 2016, she now funds TKE Studios in Margate, offering workspace to young artists.
Source: Tracey Emin
