This is a piece of Tracey Emin’s work that i have always admired. I feel that this piece is very relevant to my installation project as it encourages the viewer to climb inside of the piece to truly experience it, much like what i intend for my piece to do.

Everyone I have ever slept with, Tracey Emin

Close up of the inside of the piece

Below is an extract from my essay i completed for my contextual studies module;

Tracey Emin is an artist who was born in London, England in 1963. Tracey Emin is part of the Young British Artists movement that is otherwise known as the YBA’s. This is a movement of young artists who began exhibiting art together during the late 1980’s and the 1990’s. A lot of the artist work provided shock tactics and openness of materials and processes. The most well known of the YBA artists is Damien Hirst who was the one that organized the first exhibition entitled Freeze in 1988 while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College of Art in London. Tracey Emin has worked with many different mediums such as painting, drawing, film, photography, sculpture, sewn applique and neon text. Within her artworks Tracey Emin explores self portraiture by using her own life experiences. One of Emin’s most notorious pieces is the piece titled Everyone I have Ever slept with from 1995, this piece was made by the artist sewing around 100 names of everyone she had ever shared a bed with, but not just in a sexual manner, these names included family, friends and even her two aborted fetuses. These stitched names were placed on the inside of a store bought tent, to view the piece the viewer had to crawl inside of the tent, this was done to gave a sense of safety within the public space of an art gallery. The piece was sadly destroyed in 2004 along with a lot of other contemporary art pieces when there was a fire in a Momart art storage warehouse. Tracey Emin’s tent piece was often judged by people on the fact that they would mistakenly think it was a list of the names that the artist had had sex with rather than had fallen asleep in the same bed with. This was because of the euphemism connected to the saying slept with. When Tracey Emin’s piece was about more than just sex.