Nature plays an important role in Tracey Emin’s art.
With ecological art being the hot topic of the contemporary art scene, and ecofeminism and Post Anthropocene still lurking in the minds of scholars and cultural commentators, this probably sounds like an unoriginal, if not, boring statement. I did not start my investigation with these theoretical frameworks in mind, nor do I believe that Emin’s artistic enterprise has much to do with environmental concerns. For Emin, nature is part of her existence. It is one of the many things in life that gives her intense emotions and experiences of intimacy.
Although the artist rarely depicts nature itself, nature features prominently in her life stories which are essentially the blueprints of her art. In March 2016, Emin famously announced her marriage with a monumental stone near her studio in the South of France. The immortal stone as she described is ”beautiful” and “dignified”. It is an anchor for Emin, “If I feel really low – I think about the stone and it actually makes me feel better.”
Also in 2016, Emin started to make giant bronze female figures. These monumental sculptures are ‘stones’ she made for all the restless souls in the world. The figures are mothers and lovers, raw and weighty, “beautiful” and “dignified”. The silhouette of her body rises and falls as she turns, stretches, and sprawls on the ground. The curving hip, stretching legs, arching spine, and curled-up body metamorphoses into an undulating mountain range.
The Mother (2018) kneeling outside the MUNCH Museum in Oslo's harbour is the most magnificent figure among Emin’s creations. She kneels at nine-metre height weighing 18.2 tonnes. A ‘larger than life’ mother figure, she leans forward and embraces you in her chest. However, from the back, we see her gentle body turning into an enormous mound. As everlasting as the earth, she sits firmly at the harbour giving her protection to Oslo.
Emin’s art is often imbued with the afterimage of natural landscapes.
In 2009, Louise Bourgeois sent Emin a series of her gouache paintings of bodies in profile and asked her to do whatever she wanted with these pictures. Emin held onto Bourgeois’ pictures for over a year without making a mark and then made all sixteen drawings in a single day. In the finished pictures in Do Not Abandon Me (2009-10), swarms of red, blue, and pink gather on the cream-coloured fabric to form silhouettes of sixteen voluptuous torsos. Upon their heavy drooping breasts, rounded bellies and erect penises there dwells Emin’s tiny figures. These tiny women, delicately delineated, are inscriptions of her psyche. ‘She’ lays down and points to the swelling belly. ‘She’ kneels and embraces the pillar with a kiss. One crawls across the body and another hides within. The tiny figural scribbles have turned the allusive gouache torsos into God-like monumental giants. They are paying homage to Bourgeois’ creation, at the same time, reinventing the original pictures: the body into a fantastical landscape, the human into a larger-than-life being, the man into a monolith, the mother into Mother Nature.
Nature features prominently in Emin’s video work.
One of the most iconic is the film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998), filmed on the seashore of Åsgårdstrand in Norway where Munch spent every summer as a young man. He staged his most important series 'The Frieze of Life’ on this rocky coast along the sinuous shoreline. Emin’s short film starts and ends with a view of the sea shimmering under the sun. On the pier outside of Munch’s cottage, Emin curls up in a foetal position in her naked body. The form of her crouching body echoes with the stone she would marry and the sculptures she would make decades later.
Munch’s sea is in Åsgårdstrand, yet Emin’s is in Margate. At some point in their lives, they both fled from the sea to look for a life outside. Nevertheless, Munch always returned to the sea through his paintings. Likewise, Emin eventually moved back to Margate in 2017.
The sea is a huge part of the Margate life. From May 2022, Emin started to swim in the Margate sea every day — “This is where I swim. This is where I feel most alive” (11 September 2022 post on Instagram). She often wrote about her sea swims. “Yesterday morning I swam for an hour and a half .. The sea was like a mirror” (5 September 2022 post on Instagram). What is better than the Margate sea is the Margate sunset. As the sun dips into the sea, it composes the most glorious colours. Orange and pink flickers in the atmosphere of the sea. One of these most ravishing suns has been recorded in her Because of You I Killed the Sun (2022). It was the sunset of her 59th birthday, the sun was big and red, the sky tinged in orange. But the sunset on its own did not satisfy Emin on her canvas. She attacked the sun with her brush creating a mountain-like silhouette with curves of a reclining woman. The text above her body reads, “I Loved you So Much. I Destroyed my own Happiness — All because of you.” Paint drips down the canvas. A reflection of the sun falls on the grey sea.
The sunset is Emin’s happiness, but the sunrise is an entirely different phenomenon. The artist had suffered insomnia most of her life. When the day breaks after a long sleepless night, the light becomes her enemy. Nature can be Emin’s friend and her foe. Nonetheless, the relationship is always intimate. The stone, the sea, and the sun, they stir great effects on body and soul.