In her latest solo exhibition at London’s White Cube in 2024, Tracey Emin unveiled a colossal sculpture. Sharing its title with the exhibition itself, this massive piece disseminates the irony of pleasure throughout the entire space, rooting itself in vehement passion and channeling pain and ambition into action. It is practically a proof of the radical and authentic wholeness so often noted in Emin’s artistic approach.

Set in the middle of the gallery, the sculpture offers a profoundly dramatic sight. Bodily sensations, spread across tactile areas, are separated out and transformed into an expressive whole. Worn-down limbs and an abject appearance lend the sculpture an inviting stance, yet it seems to be dragging itself across the floor, deprived of any vital function. Moreover, writhing in genuine fragility and distress, it gives voice to the unending cry of a psychic longing for love a longing glorified by the intangible landscape in which it resides.

a damaged aura of private moments

Serving as an all-encompassing, conceptual lens that also governs the space with its temporal dimension, this figure-cum-mass stands as an expressive response to boundary experiences. At the same time, it wields a power to confront and exalt pain felt in parallel with violence. In these narrow passages the sculpture reveals, one witnesses laments over heartbreak and loss, and, more importantly, a ritual of rebirth intimately connected with survival.

In a sense, guided by a rich stream of inner monologue, Tracey Emin decides how far and how deeply the human form should be worn down, and how to showcase, in all its glory, a pathos-laden imagination in the face of extreme deformation. Indeed, in the traumatic and brutal figuration at play, the body is sometimes recast as an abject source of pleasure and employed as a reference to women’s privileged position and resilience in a broader social context. Thus, we may speak here of a hyper-imagistic presentation grounded in Emin’s critical stance. With a renewed dynamic of seeing -built upon a distinctly feminine sense and perception -the sculpture generates a severely damaged aura of private moments, complicated by the presence of genuine passions.

Furthermore, through the unusual narratives that emerge during the act of creation, Emin arrives at a tangible sculptural interpretation aided by the provocative force of her troubled social relations and her exploration of mental anxieties. Often in this process, she constructs a disjointed yet dreamlike world within the tranquil depth of post-mortem silence, hinting at a newly awakened romantic life.