Artist Dame Tracey Emin says My Bed installation is like a ‘crime scene’
My Bed appears as part of her Tracey Emin: A Second Life exhibition at London’s Tate Modern, which launched on Friday.
Artist Dame Tracey Emin has described her My Bed installation as a “crime scene” and that she has to wear a hazmat suit when setting it up.
The controversial 1998 installation, which was inspired following a depressive episode which saw the artist spend four days in bed, consists of Dame Tracey’s own dishevelled sheet-stained bed surrounded by detritus including used condoms, empty vodka bottles and cigarette butts.
Known as one of Dame Tracey’s best known-installations, My Bed appears as part of her Tracey Emin: A Second Life exhibition at London’s Tate Modern, which launched on Friday.
Speaking on BBC’s Ready To Talk with Emma Barnett podcast, Dame Tracey revealed the logistics of her infamous art installation. adding that when it is being set up or taken down, a hazmat suit has to be worn.
She said: “The bed can only be shown about every five years and only for a certain amount of time because of the fragility of everything.
“It is like a crime scene. It is phenomenal.
“We have to wear those hazmat suits.
“It has all these little pockets and boxes, and in it is lots of little bags with everything in it, each thing, like two safety pins, apple core, condoms.
“The only thing that got changed over about 20 years ago was the Nurofen and headache pills because they were worried that they might be taken or whatever. So health and safety made me change them over.”
She added that despite the bed being hers, she no longer owns it and that the Tate is responsible for its identity.
The acclaimed British artist, 62, was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020 and underwent major surgery including an urostomy.
Speaking about how she felt installing the bed post cancer, she said: “It’s sad.
“Last time I’d installed it, I was fit. I hadn’t gone through all of what I’ve gone through and emotionally, it would have pulled something through me as I was reinstalling it, sense of memory, time, all of these things.
“The value of something, does this relate, does this matter? Who is this person? Am I that person? Is any part of me left still remaining in that bed? My spirit, my soul. Where is the energy from the person who created the person who survived this bed? Have they gone and come back again? All of these questions. That’s what I was thinking as I was doing it, and it was really, really sad.
“I feel like crying now. I don’t know why it affected me so much, but it did. It was really strange.
“This bed that’s at the Tate, I hate it in a way. It’s so sad, whereas the one at Turner (Contemporary Art Gallery) wasn’t sad and then the one in Liverpool looked angry. The bed has its own power, its own way, its own life in a way.
“Every time I installed the bed, it has a different sort of character about it, a different feeling.”
The exhibition, which runs until August 31, includes works from her first-ever solo exhibition at White Cube in 1993, and two of her best-known installations, Exorcism Of The Last Painting I Ever Made (1996) and My Bed (1998), the latter of which was nominated for the Turner Prize.
Dame Tracey is a member of the Young British Artists movement of the 1980s and a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.
The full Ready to Talk with Emma Barnett episode can be listened to on BBC Sounds.
