I haven’t found the energy to blog over the last few days…..my mind needed a sit down.
Back now.
On Friday members of the art forum I run went on an awayday to Margate.
Force 9 gales and that exhilarating smell of ozone permeated everything.
A great exhibition from Tracy Emin in the Turner. Awash in blue gouache; intimate and vulnerable as always.
Having spent time in the exhibition and now with the audio round my neck – having been told it was worth it – [which it was] I looked up and there was our Tracy. A bizarre jolt of recognition and then a ‘do I continue into her path or not’ conundrum. She proved friendly and engaging , signing programmes and posing for camera phones before disappearing off again.
It was strange to continue meandering on afterwards, peering at depictions of her sexuality. Her work seems to confide her intimate secrets but many have mirror writing – the reveal facing away from her audience.
A group of work done in 2011 around an affair I found deeply moving. I can see some of the work clearly even now. A sure sign that it reached me in some way.
In a later set of work done after the split she depicts them both in bed; she is clutching on to the side of the bed in a foetal position – taking up as little room in the world as possible. In another she dreams he has returned. She is again on the edge of the bed. This time physically closer to what I presume is her cat Docket than her lover.
She says she has given up and now feels free of the need to find a lasting relationship. Sadly her work seems to offer someone unable to commit.
Supper was taken at the end of the Harbour Arm; a wild sea on both sides. Then on to visit the Margate gallery to see if our WinaPrint tickets had won one of the amazing prints on offer – mine of course hadn’t.
The gallery had organised a live Arts Council feed from the Turner of Tracy Emin and Stephen Fry in discussion. The tickets had sold in the first ten minutes, so we waited expectantly.
A sad disapointment. He was unprepared – called her bed installation ‘Everyone I ever slept with’, told her she had lost a lot of work in the Momart fire [she lost two] etc…
He then tried to offer psychoanalysis around her childhood abuse and subsequent behaviour. She, [and we] became more and more uncomfortable until she said with geat dignity – ‘I am going to change the subject’, and talked about her cat.
The highlight was her charming defence of Margate at every turn, her deft handling of his lumbering inability to give her a platform of any sort and her vision of her home town with the neon signs returned, the lamposts festooned with lights and Dreamland and the Lido as extrodinary as they once were.
