Born 1963, Croydon.

Emin’s work has always been prevalent in my life. One of my earliest memories relating to my love for art is seeing an exhibition of Emin’s work and being amazed despite not fully understanding its impact or dept.

As I am using excerpts from an old diary of mine in my 3D project, each quote is uniquely raw and feels confessional. As I began to experiment with creating for this project, I started seeing more and more commonalities with Emin’s work – which I think comes from the similarity in subject matter, but also stems from my love for her work and its impression on me at such a young age. I almost wanted to steer away from using Tracey Emin as one of my contextual artists as I often feel its overdone, but I think its evident that it would be silly to dispute the obvious inspiration of her work in this project.

A lot of my diary entries are my thoughts and feelings going through a breakup at the time, I think they relate closely to the theme of heartache that Emin often writes about in her own work.

The below group are Emin’s Neon work. She started using this medium of bending neon lights into words in 1995, and has said the inspiration behind this comes from her hometown of Margate, where they display many neon signs. Emin often refers to her hometown and childhood in her work – relating to the theme of memories. It is also important to note that these lights are molded in her own handwriting, which makes the pieces more personal and individual.

During the digital week I began experimenting with bright colours, especially blue and pink. In previous projects I have used a lot of black and red for writing, but I’m trying to avoid this and stretch out further so my work doesn’t all look too similar and has more room to develop.

I wanted to include Emin’s work that includes a different surface texture, as well as include some 3D work. I am also inspired by the use of colour in the pieces below.

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