How It Feels - Tracey Emin

Im really inspired by Tracey Emin's work, she so brutally and honestly articulates the more disastrous, messy, complex, and contradictory side of being a woman. Its a common feeling all women go through, that gruesome messiness that often develops our character, personality and is often a learning curve for us. In her video "How it feels", she says "To be honest, I think that abortion was a mistake, but it's the best fucking mistake in the whole of my life". This sentence I felt really showed that side of women that we go through lots of emotional pain yet we carry on with our lives, from the outside it often seems we don't give these life altering painful situations much attention at all. I find this really interesting, because this behaviour and attitude, it is so specific to us women as a whole.

This has really inspired me to include raw recordings of emotion, whether its text, audio or video and include that in my work. I feel it really adds a personal touch, it allows the audience to feel comfortable, understood, like no judgement will be passed upon what they think, feel or say. I want to emulate this feeling in my own work. I'd like to experiment with character portraits, and it could be interesting to bring this aspect of personal story telling into them.

Research This page is part of the collection 'Part 3'.

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