Talk: ‘Do not abandon me’ Tracey Emin and Wayne Tunnicliffe on Louise Bourgeois

(applause) 

Wayne Tunnicliffe: Thanks, Justin, and thanks to you and Emily Sullivan for that extraordinary exhibition. I hope you’ve all seen it. If you’ve not seen it, please go and see it. I think it’s the most remarkable exhibition of Louise’s work I’ve seen, and it’s so cleverly constructed around day and night between a very thoughtful, very engaging, very intelligent museum show on the ground floor and then going downstairs to its unconscious, its subconscious, it’s kind of like all the works have got together and having a rave in our tanks and it really is [an] incredible experience and a great way to see those works. 

It’s such a pleasure to be here with Tracey, this is the first time we’ve caught up on this trip and it’s our 20-year anniversary Tracey, we did the show with you here in 2003. It’s wonderful to welcome you back.   

Tracey Emin: It’s nearly 21 years.  

Wayne Tunnicliffe: It’s almost 21 years, isn’t that extraordinary? And of course you were last here five years ago for The distance of your heart, your wonderful installation which was launched by the City of Sydney in town as well. So it’s extraordinary poetical bronze birds, which alight through our city. So you’ve got a deep engagement here, and of course, a deep engagement with Louise’s practice. And that photograph that Justin referred to, you and Louise are looking at each other in 2010. It’s the last year of her life, and there’s such intimacy and regard and respect within that photograph, which really embodies the relationship you developed with her. But how did you first hear about Louise’s practice? When did you hear about it?  

Tracey Emin: Well, there was a really fantastic art historian, art critic called Stuart Morgan, who I knew in London in, from 1995. And Stuart was really greatly respected and he also taught at Ruskin [The Ruskin School of Art] at Oxford. And Stuart and I did a … Stuart invited me to teach there and we used to spend a really lot of time together. And he used to say to me, ‘You’ll really love my friend Louise, you’d love my friend Louise. You’d love her work, you’d love her work!’  

And then I saw a show of Louise’s prints, and they were dated like 1945 or 1950 something. And I thought, wow, she’s just like me! She just dates whatever she feels like, whenever she thinks it could have been made. This is so cool! And I thought, well, and I thought, but it’s odd, because they really look like sort of genuine surrealist work. They look like they could have been made at the time. And I honestly had no idea that Louise was so much older than me until much later. Well, I mean, I don’t know, I mean, it sounds really arrogant and ignorant, but I didn’t care about all the background, I just cared about the work. And then when I eventually found out that she was like 90 or 80, 89 or whatever it was, I was really shocked because the work to me looked like it was made by really, someone really with a young spirit. Somebody that was really in touch, like deeply with their soul. And it was timeless basically. So that’s when I first come across Louise’s work, through Stuart Morgan.   

Wayne Tunnicliffe: And then you were actually going to New York for a while before I think you were actually connected with Louise. So how did that develop? Because by that stage you were very interested in her. But I think Louise could be a bit daunting as a person as well.  

Tracey Emin: It’s a really good story. So people always say, you know, what was the first time you met Louise? So I’d met Jerry Gorovoy a long time before, embarrassingly, my because I used to meow a lot when I got drunk.  

And the first time I met Jerry, I just meowed. Nothing else at all.  That was it. So Jerry knew me as this artist, Tracey Emin, who meowed a lot, but anyway, I had decided that I wanted to meet Louise, and Louise used to have like these tea, like these soirees where people went and had tea and young people and students, but she wasn’t doing it anymore, and I was told that there’d probably be no chance, like, to meet Louise, and I inquired.  

And then suddenly, ‘Yes, Louise would like to meet you.’ So I was going to LA and I flew to LA via New York and I was so excited about meeting Louise I left my luggage at the airport. Can you imagine that? Left a whole bag of luggage at the airport and I went straight to Louise’s house.  And when I got to the door, the door had this sort of raw iron sort of lattice, leafy sort of shape across the glass door. 

And I was looking into it, and as I looked into it, it was like really looking into another world. Everything sort of went grey, black and white, and grey. There was no, I couldn’t see any colour. And then as I was looking, I was knocking on the door and ringing the bell. And the door was open like maybe two inches and I was calling and calling and I just pushed the door and I walked into the hallway and I was just standing there for about five minutes and then suddenly Jerry appeared and he said to me, ‘How did you get in?’ 

And I said, the door was open. He said, it couldn’t have been. The door is never open. And I said, ‘Well, how did I get in?’ And then, it was all really like, really sort of strange. And then I went through into the parlour, the back room, and Louise was sitting there. And if I thought the hallway was, was one tone, black and white, everything in this parlour was just like in a sort of sepia tone, apart from these amazing ink, cerise pink drawings that were on the floor. 

And they were just flying in my mind, they were flying up with colour. And everything else was just like this sepia tone, with the exception of Louise, who looked like so formidable. She was at the table. I used to have really big breasts then, I had a reduction, but Louise’s was ginormous! Louise had these huge breasts and these huge hands. Her hands were so strong. And I was just thinking, God, this is really unreal, this whole situation. But that was the first time I met Louise. And Louise said to me, this is Wayne’s point here, Louise said to me, ‘Oh, how long have you been coming to New York? When, when? When did you come? When? When? New York. When? When?‘ And I said, oh, I don’t know, maybe 11 years ago. And she went fucking ballistic. She went mad, mad, mad. [imitates grunting noises] And she was like getting really angry and split her hand. And I was saying, oh my God, what have I done? And Jerry is saying, ‘Louise, Louise. Tracey doesn’t speak French. Tracey doesn’t speak French.’  

And Louise was saying, ‘Why now? Why have you only come now? Why has it taken so long? Why has it taken so long?’ So it was a really wonderful thing that she sort of, she made me feel so welcome and so, like, you know. But all, I was really, you know, with the French and everything, I was kind of like, I suppose, frightened, a little bit frightened of her. 

But Jerry calmed the situation down. And apparently, I didn’t realise Jerry had been reading my book to her, Strangeland, which she really liked. So in some ways she’d sort of got to know me before I knew her and we, we got on really, we got on really, really well.  

And this is another strange thing: Louise is the oldest person I’ve ever met in my life.  Not seen, not heard of, but literally sat at a table with, had a drink with, chatted with, and got to know. And that was a kind of a strange thing for me because I felt all this information, energy, time, and I felt it, I felt it, it was like she just got this big lump of time and literally handed it to me. And I could feel that, and it was, it was a strange, the whole thing was very surreal and strange but really wonderful. It was like a dream.  

Wayne Tunnicliffe: It’s wonderful that idea of handing you time, sort of her time, but also your time to come in a sense. And did the collaboration sort of initiate from that first meeting or did that come later? 

Tracey Emin: No, it came later. It’s kind of all a bit blurry for me this bit. But it came later and it came and the irony is that Louise thought that – which I agree with her actually – that collaboration is weak.  And, um, forgive me all the collaborative artists that are in the audience. But not for you, but for me, it would be a weakness. And it’s not something I would ever do now with anybody. But Louise, strangely, at the end of her life, collaborated with four people. An architect, a writer, and me. And, I can’t remember, one other person. And she gave me a roll of prints and said, ‘Do whatever you want.’ And Jerry said, ‘You can just squash them up, make them into papier mâché, make them into a sculpture. You can do whatever you want.’  

And the more they said I could do whatever I want, the more nervous I got of touching them.  So eventually it took me two years to do my side of the collaboration. And every time I saw Louise, Louise would say, ‘You have time, you have time.’ And I was thinking, oh my god, she’s 96, she’s 97. There isn’t time, isn’t there? And she’s like, ‘You have time, you have time.’ And it was like, yeah, it’s like, do what, she kept saying to me, ‘You do what you want.’ And then one, one ... and I said I want to treat it like a show. I want to treat it like a thing totally on its own. I want to deeply respect it.  

And what, when I finished all my shows, everything and I had time, I was in my studio, it was a Sunday, I rolled all the prints out. I rolled up some glass with ink on, and each print, one by one, I did the drawings on top. The next day they were dry, I rolled them all up in a roll, put them in a FedEx and sent them to New York. 

And I said to Jerry, they’re on their way. And then Jerry – Louise was in bed – and Jerry opened them in the morning and rolled them out in front of her. And every time each unrolled she clapped her hands in bed. And she really was amazed the fact that I’d turned her male figures up as landscapes. And there was one I turned into a crucifix, one penis. Another penis I made like a little woman hanging off it. And I turned one of the pregnant women into a landscape and a giant vagina. But with these re- … and then another one I wrote over. And what I liked about this is you could honestly, you couldn’t tell who had done the watercolor and who had done the drawing. It was completely, it was, it was like one person’s work. And I was so happy about this because that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to, didn’t want it to look like Tracey Emin had scribbled all over Louise Bourgeois. And at the same time, I also didn’t want to look like I’d been sucked up by Louise. I wanted it to be symbiotic. I wanted it to be one thing. And if you ever have the chance to see this, I think it’s on show in Canberra … 

Wayne Tunnicliffe: Canberra, National Gallery of Australia.  

Tracey Emin: Yeah, so, sorry, Wayne.   

Wayne Tunnicliffe: Oh, no, not at all. I think that was so insightful. Because if you see these prints, I mean, they are extraordinary. You cannot tell where one artist has begun and another artist has participated, there’s a true merging of spirits within them. And I think the title of the series Do not abandon me comes back to the idea of giving time and keeping time as well. Because you haven’t abandoned Louise, of course. Here you are talking about her. It’s almost as if she’s gifted you her spirit into the future as well.  

Tracey Emin: You know, the fact that Louise was taught by [Fernand] Léger, you know, knew [Claude] Monet. I mean, Louise’d come from this other time and then I come from this other time and I always saw it like Louise and I doing a relay and Louise is running and passing a baton to me and then I’ll be running and passing it on to someone else. 

Imagine in like, well, I don’t know let’s say 20 years’ time, I’ll say to a young artist, you know, I knew Louise Bourgeois and they’ll go, wow, because it would be like a hundred and twenty years ago or something, like a completely different time. And I don’t know, I’m just very, very proud of the collaboration and I’m very proud of being able to say that I knew Louise as a friend.   

Wayne Tunnicliffe: Look, absolutely. And I think with your practices, I mean, it is interesting because there is an overlap in your practices, but also a divergence as well. So, I think, you know, you’ve both explored love, desire, sex, loss, grief, anger and self-doubt and our progression through life towards death. But there’s an intellectuality and emotionality which pulls and pushes in your practice and Louise’s. Do you have a perspective on how you differ? 

Tracey Emin: Yeah, I mean, I really love Louise’s work. I don’t think my work is like Louise’s. I also don’t think I’m influenced by Louise, because Louise is, I would say this, Louise could have been an astronaut. She could have been an astrophysicist. Louise could have been a scientist. Louise was so academically intelligent. She had one of the best educations in the world. We are very, very different people. I, but yet she only ever did one thing. She was an artist. That was her vocation, and that’s what she was and is and will be remembered for. Nothing else but that, but an artist. I’m the same as that, except my background is phenomenally different, you know, there is no way I could have been an astrophysicist or a scientist, you know I’m the least academic person you could ever imagine and so Louise was highly academic and highly Intelligent from that perspective whereas I am not, I’m far more intuitive, I’m far more, I don’t know and … but I’m passionate and I’m very emotional  Louise was passionate and extremely emotional, but she had this very strong intellect, a backbone of intellect, where I have this backbone of just like wild emotion. 

So it’s different. It comes from a different energy, a different place. And to the unknowing, you’d think that we have a lot similar[ities] because of the sewing, because of this, because of that. But I was doing all those things before I knew Louise. That’s why Stuart Morgan said, ‘You would really love this, my friend Louise.’ And that’s what brought me together. And the other thing with Louise is, Louise made work of a giant scale, which was phenomenal. I’ve only just started doing that through the influence of Louise. So if people say to me, often say to me, you know, how were you influenced by Louise Bourgeois? I say, I’m just becoming influenced by Louise Bourgeois by understanding the use of scale. From being able to work with a tiny print, to be able to work with a giant bronze, or giant, huge, sort of almost masculine materials, but in a very feminine way. And that’s where Louise really influenced me. Her, her ability to be able to use everything and anything.   

Wayne Tunnicliffe: Oh, and I think, I think that register of difference is apparent when you see your practices together as well. And I, I like that idea of Louise influencing you as a mature artist and using other materials. And I am going to come back to that. But you also shared drawing in your practice as well. You were both passionate drawers throughout your work and I think the drawing is something which you do use in very different ways as well, but there is a sort of a ferocity of feeling and you’ve said about Louise before, her work is so emotionally magnified. It’s emotional but highly intellectual and it gets into the nooks and crannies of the mind and I love that idea of getting into the nooks and crannies of the mind and that deep set.   

Which I think yours does as well, but you also have this you know, incredible way to get people into the work. You address people very directly, very clearly from your own experience. And can you talk a little bit about how your own experience is continuing to shape your practice now?  

Tracey Emin: Well, everything’s really changed for me.  So I was, during my jet lag morning, occasionally when I woke up, I thought, oh my God, I’m doing this talk this afternoon. And you know, and I was really thinking about Louise, but trying to think about Louise in a different way from how I first met her, or a different, how, what is my perception now with Louise?  

And Louise wasn’t afraid of anything. Louise wasn’t afraid of anybody. Louise wasn’t afraid of being poor. Louise wasn’t afraid of being rich. Louise wasn’t afraid of being a female artist in New York in the 1940s, you know, which was pretty, you know, quite male dominated and worked under a strange structure. And Louise also, like, with her drawing, she was, she treated her drawings like a first, first work. 

So she didn’t make drawings to make the sculptures. She didn’t make drawings to make prints. She made drawings to explore her ideas. It was like her handwriting. And then again with Louise, with her writing, I mean God, she was a fantastic writer. Poet, prose, storyteller. Her personal, deep information was extraordinarily interesting. And you come across a lot of artists who don’t have that. They might make nice work to look at, that you can hang, but they don’t make work that twists your mind, that makes you, you know, with Louise, you go into a room, you look at her work, and you come out as a different person, thinking and being different. 

And Louise, throughout her life, changed and metamorphosed. She changed and she moved. And her work dragged her through her life. Took her through her, her work was her experience. Whereas me, my experience is my work. It’s the other way around.  

And in the last obviously, I don’t know if people know, the last few years, I had really terrible cancer. All cancer’s terrible. Mine was really fucking bad. I had like six months to live, and I had like the most heavy, kind of, seven and a half hour surgery, where I had a lot of organs removed, and all kinds of stuff, or whatever. And still after that, chances of living weren’t that high. But I did it and I’m still here so I see my life now as before and after. 

It’s like, it’s not like I’ve been given a second chance. It’s like I’ve been given another life. So my perspective on my work now is so different from how it was before. It has to be. It’s phenomenally different. And if anything, so this is going back to what I was thinking this morning about Louise. I don’t think Louise has ever been stupid. I don’t think Louise has ever really shown herself up. I don’t think Louise ever really let herself down. Even when she was throwing a tantrum and smashing things around, it was still fantastic, you know.  Whereas I can’t say that about me. When I was,  honestly, when I was throwing a tantrum, it was pathetic, right? 

And you look back on life, and you look back and you think, God, how could I have? How could I have been like that? How could I have behaved like that? And that’s the thing about being 60 now and looking back, you know, maybe even without the cancer, I was, no, I don’t think so, actually, I think I’d probably still be really stupid, but no, but I look back now and I think, God, how could I have wasted so much time? How could I have been so frivolous? How could I have been so stupid? Whereas I don’t think Louise ...  I think Louise’s life was focused and directed constantly, forever. And that’s also why she carried on working right up until the end of her life. Right until the last few days.  

Wayne Tunnicliffe: And I think that’s a really fair observation. The fact that when we see Louise’s extraordinary practice over so many decades and with such sort of focus and concentration, having breaks from it, when she had a long period of psychoanalysis. Coming back into a practice that was in the 1950s and the 1960s with renewed focus and energy. And our perception of Louise as this person who embodied, you know, incredible focus and success in a sense later in life. 

But she wrote, and this is something you’ve spoken about before with Louise, and I do want to read it out. She wrote, ‘I’m afraid …’ No, she wrote, ‘I have failed as a wife, as a mother, as a hostess, as an artist, as a businesswoman, as a friend, as a daughter, as a sister, I have not failed as a truth seeker.’ 

I think that’s such a powerful comment from Louise about how she perceived herself and the world and her relationships, what she made, I felt she sacrificed in making her art and pulling that centre of her world, but she didn’t fail as a truth seeker. That’s a pretty extraordinary comment.  

Tracey Emin: Yeah but also it’s really, really honest. So, here I get into trouble in Australia now.  There was a women’s conference at the Tate Gallery about maybe 15 years ago or something and  I said ... Someone said to me, didn’t you once say that women couldn’t be success … No, someone couldn’t be successful as an artist if they had children? 

And I said, no, I didn’t say that. I said there’s lots of successful artists with children, they just happen to be men.  And obviously I was being slightly, you know, off the cuff and jokey or whatever. But it was actually quite a serious statement. Because then they, someone from the audience got really angry with me and said, you know, I’ve got 25 children, I’m a really successful artist, how dare you say that. 

And I said, no, I’m not talking about you! I’m talking about great female artists within history. So I said, Picasso, name me Picasso’s female equal. Francis Bacon, name me Francis Bacon’s female equal. David Hockney. And I went through all these lists. I said, come on, give me the female name that equals that. So someone goes, oh, what about your friend Louise?  

And I said, you ask Louise if she was a good mother. Ask her. Because Louise made lots of sacrifices to put her art where it was. And she said it herself with that statement as well. Her art was everything. When her husband died, she, he was, you know, an amazing art historian. And instead of mourning for him, she got rid of his library and their home, and turned the whole house into a studio and used the kitchen and the oven to bake clay. 

You know, art was her whole drive and her whole life. And more so than being a mother, more so than being a wife, more so than anything. And that really proved itself. Because it was only in the last 30 years of Louise’s life that her career come to fruition. Because she could put 100 percent of herself into it.   

Wayne Tunnicliffe: Absolutely, and I think that’s the idea of motherhood, which is very much part of Louise’s practice. It has been in part in your practice as well. You’ve done works in the past about not being a mother. And they’ve been quite, you know, very powerful, thoughtful, confronting works. But of course, in front of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, our South Building, we’ve got Maman right there now, the giant spider mother, a protective creature, a devouring creature.  

She sits between this idea of embracing you, but she could eat you at any time as well. You’ve recently also made a large-scale bronze sculpture called The mother and that’s a loose segue but you’ve done that as well, which is actually in Oslo, outside the Munch Museum and it’s an extraordinary work. Can you tell us a bit about that?  

Tracey Emin: Yeah, first of all, I’d like to say I think that’s a brilliant segue. I mean, that was pretty, I didn’t see it coming. That was really good. Yeah, it’s great. Yeah, so this goes ... Let’s keep it on Louise. So, I made this bronze sculpture. It’s nine metres high and it’s called The mother.  

And it’s my mother but it’s also myself. And it’s also like every mother. And she’s an old woman. And you can see that she’s old and she’s bent over.  It’s nine metres high and it’s solid bronze and it took a long time to get to Oslo, it was shipped out, it was all put together on the dock, the whole thing was a massive. Harry, who I work with, he knows more about it than me, because he handled it all, it was incredible, but that was another influence of Louise, and when I was in New York, and I’m very good friends with Scott Lyon-Wall and Jerry Gorovoy and other people from the Easton Foundation. 

You know, after Louise died, there was a fantastic opportunity for me to work with David Baskin and work with the foundry that Louise worked at and learn about the lost bronze [lost-wax bronzecasting] technique. And it was fantastic. It was like a gift to me. I was being given this gift, which I really embraced. And I went from making tiny, little bronzes that were like three inches to now making 9 metre-high bronze figures that stand on the fields of Norway next to the Munch Museum. So this was like indirectly another gift from Louise, another passing on of something. Like, you can do it. You will do it. With all the help of the people that surrounded her who helped her do things. So, you know, it was – sorry I’m just bringing it, this is a segue right – bringing it back to Louise.  

Wayne Tunnicliffe: Well it does look, I’ve only seen images, but it looks so strong in front of that sort of super contemporary building. And this gigantic, larger than life figure sitting there. Her legs open, the fjord’s in front of her, she’s looming, looming over there.  

Tracey Emin: Yeah, but it’s not sexual at all, it really is motherly. Like her legs are, she’s sort of kneeling and her legs are open, like as if she can embrace you and pull her to you and take care of you. And when … oh okay, I do not enter competitions. But I did with this because I really wanted to be next to the Munch Museum. I never thought I’d get it, but I did get it. And my statement for the work was like, you know, I want Munch to have a mother. Because Munch’s mother died when he was six. So, and I said, I want a mother to protect Munch’s art. I want a mother to welcome people in. And I want a mother to protect people. And it’s really brilliant because you get all the big, this horrible big giant cruise line of things come in past it, but it’s on this like massive field. So she’s there sort of welcoming in everybody, but also protecting the Munch Museum, protecting Munch’s work. So and my mum had just died as well, so it’s also a homage to my mother. So, even though I won’t ever be a mother, I really obviously appreciate everything that mother means and stands for because without a mother, I would not be here. 

None of us would be here. So this goes back to Louise. Louise was actually like maybe not the best literal mother with her own children, but she was actually a fantastic art mother. She encouraged and worked with so many young people. She encouraged me right at the end of her life. So this is a very motherly, nurturing, wonderful thing. And even though she wasn’t, didn’t have that kind of mummy sort of personality she was very motherly in terms of her generosity and experience.   

Wayne Tunnicliffe: No, and I think, yes, all of which comes out in that extraordinary work. I do want to say, there was another quote from Louise which really has struck me very strongly and you’ve spoken about before as well, and I’m going to read it out. 

When she says, ‘I’m afraid of silence, I’m afraid of the dark, I’m afraid to fall down, I’m afraid of insomnia, I’m afraid of emptiness. Is something missing? Yes. Something is missing and always will be missing. The experience of emptiness.’ Do you have fears in your life at this point? Because I know that shaped parts of your practice before, you’ve been very open about anxieties and fears.  

Tracey Emin: Well, I, so this is something I really do have in common with Louise, is insomnia. So I have terrible, terrible insomnia, and I always have had since I was a little girl. And I say, with insomnia, if you’re in love, for example, and you have insomnia, it’s wonderful. Because you have more hours to be in love. 

If you are feeling like the worst thing in the world has happened, or you’re feeling very low, or you’re feeling very depressed, or manic, or anxious, insomnia is hell. It’s a living hell. Because you have more hours with that anxiety, more hours. Of sweating and worrying more hours of fear. And so I definitely know that Louise, a lot of Louise’s ideas and works came out of those, those dark hours.  

And with me it’s very much the same as well because all my ideas and anxieties come to the top and to fruition in those dark hours. And I always say this thing about waiting for the light to come and I’m there waiting for it to come, waiting for it to come, like today. 

And when it does come, I’m so tired, like I can’t do anything with it.  And the light, the light, talking about abandonment, the light then abandons me. Instead of looking after me, the light becomes my enemy because I actually want to close my eyes and sleep. And if you, anyone who suffers from insomnia knows about this, if you can’t sleep and you spend three or four nights not sleeping, you will start to become mentally psychotic.   

I’m paranoid and your nervous system starts to get really fucked up and not work properly.  But you tend to have like these amazing dreams when you do sleep and these genius ideas that come from nowhere. Because you’re living in this sort of twilight time, in this sort of weird parallel world or whatever. It’s a very strange place. And people always say to me, why don’t you work when you have insomnia? And I said, because if I was working, it wouldn’t be insomnia.  Somebody who works a night shift doesn’t have insomnia. They work in the night shift. I don’t work the night shift. I’m in a situation where I can’t sleep and then I have more hours with more fear, more hours with more ...  

And when I had cancer, it was like the insomnia was unbelievable. Like, I went nine days without hard ... nine nights without hardly sleeping and I thought I was, I think sleep deprivation is probably one of the worst tortures in the world. It is, it is really and truly.  

Wayne Tunnicliffe: So I just want to come back to your practice and back to Munch actually and a collaboration of sorts again with another artist, which is Munch himself. Because recently, well in 2020, 2021, you had the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and at the Munch Museum in Oslo, where you teamed up with Munch. I mean, you curated a show of his work with your work in it. I haven’t seen images of that show. There was these extraordinary resonances across your practice, across time, but of course differences as well. What was it like being the curator of this collaboration? 

Tracey Emin: Well, I wasn’t just the curator. I worked with Harry Weller, who works with me, and also with Kari [J. Brandtzæg], who’s the, she’s the contemporary curator at the Munch Museum. And we worked together for a long time on this show. And the best thing was, I had access all areas to the Munch Museum. And being, I’m a massive like, I love Munch! He’s my favourite artist, has been since I was about 17. And to suddenly be in the Munch Museum, in the archives ... We looked, one day, we looked, we, well, one week, we looked at 800 of Munch’s paintings. 

And at the beginning, we, me and Harry were going, ‘Oh my God!‘, pulling them out on the racks, going, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Oh Christ, oh look at that!’ And then by the end of the week, we’re going, ‘No. Not very good. No.’  

We were becoming, you know, and there was this really great moment where I was looking at all the watercolours and Munch, Munch was, again, like Louise, Munch was a fantastic writer, lots of poetry, lots of prose, lots of stories, lots of diaries, and he did these amazing, beautiful watercolour sheets with poems on, and sketches, and watercolour sketches, and the archivist was taking them out and showing me and he, you know, with the white gloves on with the small soft light and he was reading the poems out to me and this archivist, he had the most gorgeous voice and he was translating the poems into English and I was, I started crying and I was crying and everyone was going, ‘Are you okay?’ 

And then suddenly they went, ‘Oh my god, oh my god!’, and they moved the watercolours away because all my tears were just like … And I thought, wow, just one tear. And that would be my collaboration with Munch,  that’s it. And this is like, I know I want to talk about Louise, but I just, I mean, Louise loved Munch as well. So, and when I was in the archive, we went into this room where there was Munch’s furniture, Munch’s possessions, his hats, his paints, his drinks, the last, you know, his glasses that he drank from, everything. And there’s this box, and they opened up this box – this is really true – and as they opened it, this hat moved. It went ‘woohve’ inside the box and we all jumped and it was, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. It’s the ghost of Munch. It’s the ghost of Munch.’ 

And in the Munch Museum, the doors are like submarine doors, or like bank vault doors, you know, so, and the doors are really heavy and then after this hat moved, the door went ‘graaaaar’, and there is no way the door could close on its own. And then further up the room, there was Munch’s furniture. And there was a sofa, which I’d seen in quite a lot of his paintings with the patterns and everything. And I ran my hand along the back of this sofa. And as I ran my hand along the back of it, I got a complete shiver. All the way through me, and I thought, my God, Munch sat on that sofa, and I’ve just touched it. 

So, it’s like, you know, it was a magical experience for us, working with the museum, doing the show, getting to know the work so well, and the best thing about it, about the Munch show, was it had been organised before I was diagnosed with cancer and then as it looked like I was probably going to die from the cancer, I kept thinking, well, it won’t be that bad because I’ll have my Munch show on at the Royal Academy and there’ll be queues around the block and it’ll be, and everyone will be crying and it’ll be, and it’ll be the last thing that people see, the last show, you know, that I worked on and I thought it’s not a bad way to go really, so.  

Wayne Tunnicliffe: I think we’re all quite grateful you didn’t go, Tracey.   

Tracey Emin: Yeah, I was just trying to look on the bright side, you know.  

Wayne Tunnicliffe: Absolutely, I think that’s fantastic. I’ve got another segue. So Louise Bourgeois, there’s a very, she often defined herself in this work with this title in the exhibition called Runaway girl because she grew up in France, she grew up with a family, her mother died when she was relatively young, her father was still alive, she met her husband to be in the small art gallery she had opened in Paris and then three weeks later they were married on the way to New York.  

So she left behind her father, her brothers, that family, that life and called herself a runaway girl. In a sense, you were a runaway girl from where you grew up, Margate. Margate, if anyone knows it, is on the Kent coast in England. In the 70s and 80s, it was the sort of town The Smiths wrote songs about, ‘Every day is like Sunday’. But it’s had an extraordinary revival, which you’ve been part of as well. And I did want to talk about that because the Tracey Emin Foundation, the TKE Studios and the residency program. It’s such a contribution to give back.   

Tracey Emin: Yeah, it is. So I want to ask a question: who’s heard of Margate in England? Hey! No, I swear like, if ten years ago, no one would have put their hand up. Unless, you know, today Margate really is on the map. And for me, it’s a good example of how art can turn everything around. Margate is a very impoverished town. It was complete-, most of it was boarded up. All the shops in the 80s, totally boarded up.  

It was, it had one, one in three people were unemployed, which is pretty high. And now, because of art, and because of creativity, the whole town has turned around. It’s a mecca. People come to England who like art and they go to Margate. There’s like restaurants opening, or vintage shops, coffee bars, but it’s all by creative people and people that aren’t, they’re not doing it to make money or anything.  

They’re doing it because they love coffee or they’re doing it because they love, like, 1970s Snoopy t-shirts or something. You know, everybody’s doing it because they’ve got a vocation and they’ve got a love of what they do. And there’s a brilliant, really great community atmosphere there. And I might, you know, I’m trying to get you all to go there when you go to England, but it really is a beautiful town.  

It has fantastic Georgian houses and properties and everything and it’s got it’s the actual sea and the and the sunsets are incredible and that’s why Turner spent so much time there. The sea, even though Margate is on the southeast, north coast facing out to the North Sea, it’s facing west because it turn, kind of turns around. So when the sun sets, the sun is ginormous. And it goes, and the horizon line is very close so the sun looks really big. It’s this great big red giant circle that just dips into the sea. And then all the sea sort of flashes with the rainbow colours and on really special sunset nights you have everybody standing on the harbour arm and when the sun goes down everybody claps. It’s, I mean, it’s really beautiful and the sunset is for free. No one has to pay for the sun setting, so it’s kind of very poetic and beautiful and I’m really not proud of what I’ve done there, I’m proud of what the town has done for itself and what creativity does. And I always say wherever art goes, commerce follows. And this is really true of Margate. But this is the good news. We have gentrified it. The artist-, we actually got in there, we got the properties, we’ve done it, we’ve restored it, and we’re looking after it.  

So the gentrification can only go in the direction that we want it to go in. And we’re gonna, and this is nice, Marfa, Donald Judd, where Donald Judd, you know, Marfa, we’re gonna, Margate’s gonna twin with Marfa, which I think is really brilliant. And we, because we got the M A R and everything, so, and we’re gonna have like definitely have a whole lot of t-shirts and things, you know, Margate is my Marfa, Marfa is my Margate, or whatever.  

So, you know, so it’s kind of pretty, it’s getting international now. And the school, I opened up an art school there, and studios, which is part of my foundation, which is part of my legacy, because going back to the thing, when I thought I wasn’t going to make it, I also had to think, what’s life about? What do I want? What’s important to me? Art is important to me. Art is the most important thing in the whole world. So I thought, well, you know, I don’t want to go shopping and buy a Munch or ... what would I want from art? And I want more art in the world, I want more artists, I want more good thoughts, more good energy, and art leads to very good positive things.   

Art never leads to anything bad or destructive. It only leads to goodness. So bringing more art to Margate and more artists is going to help my hometown where I grew up. And it is. And now we’ve got, we’ve got an artist residency with, we have ten residences every year and a half. We have professional artist studios, which are all subsidised, and we have an exhibition program and it is just getting better and better.  

And we’ve now got a restaurant opening, which is a trainee kitchen for young people that are interested in culinary and hospitality ...

(applause)

Wayne Tunnicliffe: Which is an incredible contribution. Marfa, Margate, you see how Tracey’s so good with the segue! They can be loose, it works, it absolutely works. I think just we should finish up. I think your comment about loving art, wanting more art to exist and art doing good is a wonderful, wonderful thought for us to go with. Is there anything else you want to say about Louise in this moment?   

Tracey Emin: Well, I could just say thank you Louise for bringing me here and thank you Louise for bringing all of you here, I mean it what power, power from the grave. I mean, it’s a good, it’s a good, it’s a great omen for art. It’s fantastic. The fact that she still has this power with her work and people are becoming more and more interested.  

And I think this is so positive for female artists. I’ve always said this thing: men, male artists peak when they’re about 40 or 50 but women only get going when they’re about 50. And it’s like sex: men just have one big giant ejaculation but women come, and come, and come again.   

(laughter and applause)

Wayne Tunnicliffe: I’ve got nothing to add to that! That was absolutely magnificent. I mean, Tracey Emin, a great artist, a great public speaker, and a truly great person. Let’s give her one more round of applause. Thank you! 

(applause)