Tracey got into sex and Paul got into scrapes with the law.She once challenged a journalist to put himself in her position. "You're a slag from Margate with big tits and a gold chain," she said. "What do you do?"That is, what do you do if you are those things but also a bit tragically gloomy and dark and difficult, with a quirky, off-beat, creative sensibility. Do you go mad? She did for a while, after her second abortion Commit suicide? She tried that, too.
She jumped off the harbour wall in Margate at night when she was drunk, fully clothed, and felt herself sink to the bottom and then rise up slowly to the surface again."I felt nothing," she says "Actually I did feel something. I felt very tiny."She realised she was a survivor and that she'd better get on with things. She'd ducked out of school at an early age but she managed to get into Maidstone College of Art and she faithfully followed the Life room exercises there - drawing the model in five seconds, watching figures move across the room and then closing her eyes and trying to draw their bodies from memory, drawing her own hand. She learnt print-making and did a lot of wild oil paintings of distorted bodies writhing in bedrooms.Her favourite art was by Edvard Munch and Byzantine painting. But when she got taken on by the Royal College of Art in London, she found there wasn't much interest in that kind of thing It was considered a bit corny. One day she found there wasn't any storage space there either, and as there certainly wasn't any room for all her paintings from Maidstone in her tiny squat, she took them out into the Royal College courtyard and smashed them up with a hammer, screaming and crying while she did it.
It took all day and when she'd finished her hands were bleeding.It was the time of her emotional suicide, as she calls it. She'd just had her second abortion, no one cared about her painting, she didn't believe in it herself any more Everything was black. She lay around drinking and got the idea that she'd better reinvent herself again, this time as something more than just a painter She managed to achieve her aim through two things One was her natural determination. From the room where she lived with all her cardboard boxes full of childhood memorabilia, she started writing round to everyone she knew, asking them to invest in her creativity by sending her pounds l0 Amazingly, she got 80 replies with the money. The other was her chance encounter with the artist Sarah Lucas. They met in a gallery in south London, became friends and opened up a shop in Bethnal Green where they sold funny bits of punky art bric-a-brac. There were ashtrays with Damien Hirst's face on them, T-shirts with the words "Complete Arsehole" roughly hand-painted on them, and bits of cut- up blanket, which they called Rothko security blankets.
They lived on Guinness and curries, and then finally put a sign up that said "Shop Closed, Gone to Mexico". When Emin came back she was asked to put on a show at the White Cube gallery in the West End.She was confused by the offer. It was her first exhibition but she was convinced that it would also be her last, so she gave it the ironic title "My Major Retrospective". She sifted through all the junk in her boxes and began to build an exhibition of her life story out of what she found - diary writings, letters to former boyfriends and relatives, letters to her brother Paul in prison, a letter she'd written to her Uncle Colin who'd died in a road accident, the packet of Benson and Hedges cigarettes he'd been clutching at the moment of death, and the funny little childhood dolls and trolls she'd never thrown away.She covered one wall of the gallery with these things and on another showed postage-stamp-size photos of all her art school paintings, each one mounted on a piece of material cut from the last bit of canvas she'd ever bought. The final element in the exhibition was an embroidered quilt with the names of members of her family on it, and messages to them, like "I Love You Plum", to her grandmother.It was an intensely emotional exhibition, a blast of warm humanism in an art world that had got used to cool cerebralism as the norm Not everyone liked it. When someone reveals so much about themselves so straightforwardly, it can be embarrassing.
But, afterwards, the art world started treating her like an artist instead of a freak. From her outsider position, she'd become a brilliant observer and monitor of human feeling, an inspired tapper into the things that people really care about.Since then she has been in a stream of exhibitions and the subject of numerous magazine profiles Naturally, she's a gift to journalists. They only have to mention the title of the tent she showed once - Everyone I Have Ever Slept With - to make the reader sit up In fact, the tent really is a remarkable work. Instead of merely sensational, the effect is rather intimate and loving.