Tracey Emin has been honoured with a damehood for services to British art, and has also revealed to the BBC that she has just been given the four-year "all clear" from cancer.
She tells us she spent a day at a Buckingham Palace garden party, where she found herself shaking hands with the King and Queen.It was only on her way home that she received the call about the letter. I get the feeling she hasn’t stopped smiling since.Emin rose to fame alongside the likes of Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas as one of the YBAs.
Emin has always made deeply personal work. My Bed, her groundbreaking 1999 Turner Prize installation, was a dishevelled double bed surrounded by overflowing ashtrays, used condoms and empty vodka bottles. Inside a tent, Emin had appliquéd 102 names. The work’s title suggested sexual encounters, but she also listed people she had spent more innocent nights with during her life, including her twin brother Paul. Poignantly, she also mentioned the two foetuses from an abortion a few years before."My art is a place where people can expose themselves by looking at it, and they can feel their own feelings and their own emotions.
"I haven’t tried to be a goody goody and I haven’t tried to do the right things. I’ve lived my life how I want to live." Creating art is a "lonely" pursuit, but she also wants to discuss art as much as she can. Hence TEAR. "I decided to have more art around me. That was a bit selfish really."