Pain. Illness. Mortality. Death. Emin’s latest exhibition is dominated by expressive paintings, largely of figures in bed. Big in size and clearly rendered quickly, almost like painted sketches, with layers of urgent mark-making leaving areas of primed white canvas in the background. She mostly uses red and blue, or a mixture of the two, to make various shades of purple, giving the images a real sadness and poignancy. I was profoundly affected by these works – their honesty and vulnerability was at the very forefront of the image, the way each image was created, and how they were hung.
For me, the most interesting works were those with words. As with the marks made, the words are hurried, desperate, emotional: a stream of consciousness. I’ve always admired Emin’s unflinching honesty, but this exhibition seemed the most raw of all. Her illness seems to have stripped away nearly all the other mediums she has used, focusing on – or leaving – just her, a paintbrush and her feelings. The other pieces – some bronzes of the female form and a video installation of her stoma site – werent for me as strong as the paintings.
I want to experiment a little with the urgency of the writing in her work – tapping into raw emotion and looking at how best to capture that in my work. It might be using handwriting rather than printed text…
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