TRACEY EMIN (B. 1963)

Tracey Emin’s Feeling Pregnant II (1999-2002) is a poetic encapsulation of the urgent, consequential decision as to whether one should become a parent. At an age where many of her peers were raising children, Emin’s ambivalence was evocatively manifested in a series of installations that question womanhood and parenthood. Feeling Pregnant II features a single vitrine containing five pairs of children’s shoes set alongside a text which narrates, as Emin explains, ‘what it feels like when you think you might be pregnant, when your period doesn’t come’ (T. Emin quoted in T. Emin, C. Freedman, and R. Fuchs (eds.), Tracey Emin: works 1963-2006, New York 2006, p. 331). She describes the agony and bliss of a possible pregnancy, her weird cravings, oracular dreams, and the ultimate, overwhelming release she feels upon discovering her pregnancy test is negative: ‘I am relieved – Relieved to know I’m just a 36 year old woman with a Fucking Good Imagination’ (T. Emin, quoted ibid., p. 277).

Pregnancy and motherhood are recurrent themes for the artist, whose own personal traumas have fed into candid confrontations with ideas around sex, relationships and bodily autonomy. As Emin has said, ‘I always had this idea for years that I never wanted to have children because … I thought if you have children it meant you would come back to this earth again and I felt that if you didn’t have children then your spirit could leave to go somewhere else’ (T. Emin, quoted ibid., p. 314). Feeling Pregnant II has been included in exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Galleries of Scotland, the Hayward Gallery, London and, most recently, the touring exhibition MOTHER! at the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk.