Tracey Emin grew up in Margate and studied fine art at Maidstone College of Art. She then went on to the Royal College of Art in London. Her first solo exhibition was in 1993 at White Cube Gallery, London. Since 1995 she has participated extensively in group exhibitions world-wide and has had numerous solo exhibitions in Germany, Japan, and America as well as in the UK.
Tracey Emin's is a confessional art using her life events in works ranging from story-telling, drawing, film-making, installation, printmaking, painting, neon, photography, embroidery and sculpture. Emin exposes herself, her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in an incredibly direct manner. Drawing and printmaking have remained key media for Emin, and over the last ten years she has produced a steady output of monotype prints direct from her drawings.
Her work is frequently highly confrontational, but is redeemed by its honesty, good humour, self-awareness, poetry and ultimately, innocence. Although she deals relentlessly with the minutiae of her own life, she touches largely on issues that are common to all, not least sexuality, mortality and the meaning in life. Often tragic and frequently humorous, it is as if by telling her story and weaving it into the fiction of her art, she somehow transforms it.