Tracey Emin’s solo show at the Hayward Gallery Love is What you Want (until 29 August) is, as expected, an artistic, social and controversial event. For arguably the most famous living woman artist in the UK, the exhibition carries considerable kudos as an important cultural event.

Curator Cliff Lauson has staged the exhibition in a way that reduces the autobiographical aspect of Emin’s art through the structure of a chronological survey, and instead highlights her creative diversity.

Rooms and spaces are dedicated to mediums, showcasing different modes of making from the ubiquitous monotypes and blankets to neon signs, video art, sculptural structures, needlework, and the novelty of animated loop.

Entering Room 1 is a claustrophobic experience.  Two walls are densely hung with Emin’s early colourful blankets. The floor space is taken up with Knowing my Enemy, 2002 – a precarious looking wooden pier occupying nearly ¾ of the floor space, on its edge a wooden shed.  On the wall is a neon sign in Emin’s handwriting. The room is loud, busy, crammed. And provides a perfect introduction.

It immediately speaks stylistically about Tracey Emin, indicating instantly her versatility in  setting the scene. Chronological sequence is interspersed with thematic blocks, her blankets establishing a narrative. Her traumatic childhood is narrated in the first person, a voice of remembrance which is repeated throughout the retrospective. It is up to the viewer to decide whether this confessional narrative is autobiographical, fiction, or an elision of both.

The last room on the top floor of the gallery was the highlight of the exhibition. It was, for me, a new encounter. As Emin commented in her interview with Ralf Rugoff, she is aware of a new phase in her femininity: ageing is probably the hottest topic in contemporary art history and, true to her oeuvre, Emin is unflinching in contemplating this new stage.

Emin, like many other modernist and postmodernist artists, works hard at being an enfant terrible. Within this tradition, using the artist’s autobiography has been a revolutionary thematic shift from academic genres of painting; Courbet did so in the mid 19th century.  More recently we can evoke the art of Frida Kahlo, who was ‘discovered’ by Western postmodernists only after the publication of her comprehensive biography by Heyden Herrera in 1983. Famously, Kahlo has been seen as a postmodern artist before Postmodernism, and indeed there are strong affinities with Emin in the depiction of abortions and masturbation as well as the fictionalizing of her family for expressive purposes.

Emin presents her autobiography in highly dramatic terms: dysfunctional family, born a twin, childhood memories of riches lost, mother’s poverty, father’s double identity, abject youth with rape, bullying, and public humiliation to the point of having to leave her home town. It makes a fascinating narrative which renders the biography a pre-text to Emin’s work. Yes, everybody knows about her tent Everybody I Slept With (by the way, Fia Darvell is sore you forgot her), even more about My Bed, 1998 and most people have firm opinions about the more erotic and sexual content of Emin’s monotypes. Like Frida Kahlo, Emin is a seductress and controller of her audience. Size matters as much as theme, and makes viewers come close to her art, or recoil – either physically or emotionally. Often she makes viewers reluctant voyeurs.

And Emin’s art is suffused with text. In fact, there is so much text in her art it is really surprising that it has received so little attention beyond her mis-spellings.

Single letters, words, sentences, letters, diaries, newspapers cuttings and neon lights speak in a wide range of voices.  Sometimes the voice is factual (Hotel International, 1993); sometimes she quotes insults hurled at her (Psycho Slut, 1999). Long hand writing usually presents recollections, letters, poetry – Emin wrote and published Exploration of the Soul, 1994 and read it out as a performance piece. Neon light signs are aphorisms.  Patchwork blankets are the background for appliqué letters, words and sentences embroidered in a riotous bricolage.

In her text she employs a double-speak about herself, in both the first and third person. Much of the language is confessional in nature, some in a declamatory voice, other times simply a listing of places, people and events. Many themes and events are repeated – a repetition that could be read as a post traumatic need to revisit. The appliquéd blankets contain narratives that are disrupted both textually and visually by changing size, direction, patterning, and the patchwork backgrounds at times ‘enclose’ a statement, or elsewhere are broken down to support a single appliquéd letter. This jarring bricolage   of pattern and meaning assaults the senses of the viewer, with language coming together and disintegrating at one and the same time. Documentations, letters, newspaper cuttings are presented with photographs and other works to create the impression of an undisputed factual autobiography.

But how much is fact, and how much fiction? The exhibition uses autobiography as a powerful spring-board, at the same time claiming her artistic license to fictionalise. The tenacious dramatisation and repetitive nature of her work means some themes become like a mantra. Her texts provide the context, but at the same time they both obscure and hint at what lies at the heart of her art.

So what is so new or difficult to accept in Emin’s work? Her work is anchored in the modern history of art; she uses her voice to express her identity and as such holds a mirror to contemporary life and the dilemmas she shares with her generation. Her art is knowingly rooted in modernism, from Titian’s mythic female nudes to Manet’s translation of this theme in Olympia, a key work of modernism, in which Maurant is brazenly reclining, seductively on an untidy bed, wearing nothing but fashionable jewellery and slippers. Not to mention the plethora of feminist performance and installation art of the late 1960s and 70s. Emin has defined herself as an Expressionist.

In conclusion, this exhibition is an opportunity to examine afresh her early work and assess how more recent work evolves in relation to it. For me this is the thrill, and as for the debate of what art is for, and who, that is an additional bonus. A variety of opinion is the spice of life in the art world / Nedira Yakir, July 2011

This is a lovely project, off the beaten track in beautiful North Devon.

Three designer makers have worked in conjunction with the National Trust to explore what they describe as a modern take on the everyday objects inside this small artists’ cabin in Bucks Mills village.

Bequeathed to the Trust in the 70s, this tiny house on the crashing edge of the rocky coast is an evocative time capsule of the lives of artists Judith Ackland and Mary Stella Edwards. The Trust initiated the project as part of its effort to maintain the cabin’s link to the artworld and this sensitive, imaginative project showcases the top end of designer making in Devon.

PachaDesign, who specialize in furniture using reclaimed and natural resources, RAMP ceramics, and designer Sam Pickard have selected some of the simple, functional everyday objects within the cabin and replaced them with their own work.

This simple premise has been explored with great sophistication, with most of the pieces made specifically for very precise locations within the cabin. From the screenprinted cotton bedcover (above) to an earthenware saucepan with driftwood handle and a stunning circular reclaimed oak table in the downstairs room. There are many beautiful, light touches – printed fabric strainers in a cup, a lantern made from leaf skeletons, a carefully understated porcelain canister. Don’t miss the clothes hangers overhead in the upstairs room – a few of them have been made in earthenware and printed with the names of the new designers.

Most work in the exhibition is available for sale – it’s the first circular table pachadesign have ever made, but by the look of it unlikely to be the last – and all the designers have extensive ranges available online (links below).

The cabin is open this weekend and next, with free admission and free parking. More info on the National Trust page here. We sat on the rocky beach, and afterwards feasted on the best cheesy chips ever from The Royal Plaice in Appledore. Heaven.

www.pachadesign.co.uk / www.sampickard.co.uk / www.rampceramics.com

1. There are many influential designers but I think that TIMOROUS BEASTIES are the most inspirational contemporary textile designers. Their extraordinary print designs and combinations of traditional and digital printing are interesting not only on a visual but also on a technical level.

2. HELLA JONGERIUS – an extremely influential designer who effortlessly moves between designing for textiles to ceramics, product design etc. I find the way she continually pushes boundaries of technology and creativity very inspirational, and I have admired her work for many years.

3. JOHN MILES – we are fortunate if we have one inspirational teacher in our lives: he was mine.

4. ART EXHIBITIONS – I visit as many as I can. There are many artists I admire, but I particularly love the work of Patrick Caulfield.

5. Constantine P. CAVAFY – A Greek poet (1863-1933) whose poetry I was introduced to by a friend in 1983, especially Ithaka:

“As you set out for Ithaka / hope your road is a long one”

Sam’s work is currently on exhibition at Bucks Mills Cabin, a National Trust property in North Devon / www.sampickard.co.uk

T.S.Eliot portrait by Wyndham Lewis

With the Vorticists exhibition on at Tate all summer, here’s something interesting from the archive.

Leading scholar on Wyndham Lewis, Paul Edwards, Professor of English and History of Art at Bath Spa University, with curator and writer Richard Humphreys, instigated the authoritative exhibition Wyndham Lewis Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London in Summer ’08.

Referred to as ‘that lonely old volcano of the Right’ by W.H. Auden, Wyndham Lewis is recognised as one of the most important figures in 20th century British art. Ranked highly by his contemporaries, Lewis was a novelist, painter, essayist, poet, critic and polemicist. Frustrated idealist, his principal critical target was the monolithic, mechanised, standardised society he saw around him. As the founder of the first British modern art movement, Vorticism, Lewis required the artist to be “an explosive force” and his novels and essays explore the plight of creative thinkers in a time of mass-produced culture.

Presenting fascinating contextual detail alongside many insights into Lewis’s personal relationships with influential contemporaries, the book which accompanies the exhibition provides an invaluable resource, framing the broader picture of Lewis’s work. Here’s a taster:

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Towards the end of his life, blind and able to see his paintings only in his mind’s eye, Wyndham Lewis wrote a short review of his career as a painter for the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism. Vorticism was what Lewis was, and is still, most famous for – the avant-garde movement that he led in 1914, pioneering geometrical abstraction, composing manifestos and attempting to overturn the complacent traditionalism of British culture with the stunning magazine that he edited and designed, Blast. But in 1956 it was his work as a portraitist that Lewis singled out as a ‘grand visual legacy’, regretting only that he had not produced more: ‘In my portraits what is lacking is numbers. I wish I had done 50 Macleods and Spenders.’

This regret is perhaps misleading. Certainly he produced comparatively few oil portraits, but then there are comparatively few oil paintings in Lewis’s work as a whole. Not only were many of his earlier paintings (including several important Vorticist canvases) destroyed or lost, but the great majority of his works were executed on paper rather than canvas – a total of only 127 oil paintings, and well over 1000 works on paper. Many of these are portrait drawings, and as works of art are in no way inferior to the grander statements made by the large, definitive oil paintings that Lewis produced, often of the same subjects. Arguably, indeed, Lewis exploited his versatility with different media and his mastery of line to achieve a wider range of effects when working on paper than when he was confined to oil pigment and brush.
In 1932 he wrote:

It is always necessary to remember that oil paint, as used in the West (pigments mixed with oils, and applied to a strip of canvas or wood) does not possess any mystical advantage over images – representational or otherwise – done with lead or ink upon a strip of paper. Paper even has some notable advantages over canvas and wood, aside from the question of scale. Purer linear effects, especially of an improvisational nature, can be obtained with a dry pointed instrument upon a piece of paper, than with a wet and more blunt one upon a pigmented surface.

As the works in this exhibition demonstrate, Lewis’s portraits are always resolutely non-naturalistic and complex meditations on style and personality in a baffling world. They also have for us now an additional value: we go to them simply as portraits, works that have their own presence, evoking the reality of their sitters in a way that is quite different from what is achieved in photography. Lewis complained that portraiture in England had become a bastard offspring of the camera, and in his work he tried to restore, renew and transform the more traditional canons of visual art. Through Lewis’s work we have a special, heightened and irreplaceable record of the personalities of some of the greatest creators of the first half of the 20th century, as well as of public figures from outside the arts. It is a matchless achievement in British art of its time.

Paul Edwards and Richard Humphreys

(All extracts from Wyndham Lewis Portraits, published to accompany the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London; with kind permission / £15.)

Rabley Drawing Centre, Marlborough, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester and Spike Island, Bristol

Well I have been rushing around the countryside like a whirling dervish. London, Chichester, Marlborough and Bristol, immersing myself in some very interesting art.

Pallant House is currently hosting an exhibition of Mervyn Peake’s illustrations. It is his centenary year so I suspect shows about him will be popping up all over the place. They have some iconic original drawings for Gormenghast and Captain Slaughterboard. Superb. If you have never read Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor rush out and buy a copy, the bookshop at Pallant House has the new large format hardback edition at £15. I shall be dusting off my bright yellow paperback circa 1976 with the pages falling out! My boxed set of Gormenghast from the same era seems to have gone walkabout, I suspect onto to one of my children’s bookshelves.

Also on show, but now closed, was the Golder Thompson Collection of prints. This is a superb survey, ongoing, of modern and contemporary printmaking with a particularly wide selection from Scottish Printmakers, which is where the collection originally started. This a permanent collection gifted to Pallant House so examples are frequently to be seen in regular exhibitions. Their next exhibition features Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and Pallent House is the only UK venue so if you like their work, not to be missed.

In Marlborough, Meryl Ainsley, Director of Rabley Drawing Centre has again excelled herself with a superb hang of Sean Scully prints, their first showing, so quite a coup for Rabley (above). The lofty elegant exhibition space of the barn provides light and space allowing the work to breathe, even with the double row of the Liliane Suite Portfolio. Aquatint with sugar lift, spitbite and hand ground etching, they only come as a set of eight not as individual prints, so any collector would need to have a serious amount of space to house these very beautiful, contemplative works.

In the adjacent gallery as a complete contrast are Kerry Phippen’s disturbing altered Edwardian photograph postcards. Innocent small girls in frocks and pantaloons are now shadowed by their doppelgänger, next to them on an armchair or behind them on a bicycle seat. Larger finely executed vignette pencil drawings explore this theme further. At Marlborough School in the former squash courts, Beatrice Haines has set up an installation which is the culmination of her year long residency at the school. Taking the Sanatorium as her starting point she researched the students who had been ill there and has reproduced the trays on which they were served their meals. The walls are lined with delicate tissue paper rubbings of the graffiti that they carved into the wooden undersides in their moments of boredom. The rows of upturned tabletops have the melancholy air of pre dieus, (church prayer kneelers), and the installation is a poignant reminder that some of those sick children never made it home.

Finally, in Bristol I met Emma Stibbon and she gave me a tour of the fantastic printmaking facilities at Spike Island. Emma editions her prints here because the presses are large enough to take them. Housed in a airy, light space which facilitates creativity, Spike Print Studio is the largest open access print studio in the South West. It not only provides superb resources for intaglio, relief, screen-printing and photogravure but provide an exceptional level of support for artist-printmakers as well as students at all levels.

Fiona Robinson

Traces are all over. Tracey chimes with tracing. Tracing what?

Tracing the imprint of an abject childhood?  Traces left on monotypes – why monotypes? Because the contrary, the opposite, is equally valid?

Let me start with the exhibition catalogue. I am invited to read meanings even before opening it. “Tracey Emin” at the top of the front cover; at the bottom, in smaller lettering, the title of the exhibition: LOVE IS WHAT YOU WANT. But dominating the page is a photograph of a naked barefooted female running along a cobbled alley; she runs away from the viewer, her upper body hidden by the Union Jack flag she holds in outstretched hands. We are to assume it is Tracey herself, who is running away – not stopping, as if obeying the double yellow lines on along the road, and with a sense of urgency like the white rabbit in Alice. Is the sprint a race? On the back cover photograph she stands on a flat black roof, this time facing the viewer, still seemingly naked, with the flag wrapping her upper body, smoking. The framing cuts off her face just above the nostrils so her face is not fully in view. The image alludes to a successful end of a race. It is her PB in sporting terms, having achieved something both personally, and representing the nation.

We get more than we see. We get playfulness and careful professional judgment, we get facts and their reversals, and we are promised confessional frankness and yet denied much of it. These traits epitomize Tracey Emin’s art and how she fascinates the public – both her followers and admirers, and her detractors. The cover photographs, like much of her art, are a rebus. The front cover images her back, the back cover her front. A pair of images like the reversals we read in her neon lights. Is Anal Sex Legel? Is Legal Sex Anal? (1998). But the two cover photographs can also be read as her seductive invitation to the reader to join her on her race from the street, (the gutter?) to the top of the city roof – a visual encapsulation of her artistic career. It also represents, for me, Emin’s crafty and knowing art of seduction, and I mean here not sexual seduction but her seductive and controlling narration, her control of her audience.

Review / Part 1 / Nedira Yakir

The prolific artist and controversial celebrity Tracey Emin has a stunning exhibition, LOVE IS WHAT YOU WANT at the Hayward Gallery until 29 August; it’s a summer treat for anyone interested in contemporary British art.

Not only is the show curated in a most intelligent and intelligible format, it shows off her versatility and irreverent attitude to any form of decorum be it of polite society, adherence to a single media, or traditional classification of matter and/or subject.  Her irreverence starts with turning her abject childhood and her drunk and complicated ‘ladette’ lifestyle into an arresting narrative.  It is through this narrative that she holds the viewers’ attention; we are almost unaware that we are being drawn to an emotional involvement with her performance of her life/art.

The exhibition is accompanied by talks, events and special exhibition tours and the study day was organized by TrAIN (Research Centre for Transanational Art, Identity, and Nation).

My expectation was gratified by a morning of six papers, all well researched and thought out, and with interesting  discussions.  Although it was a surprise to see the Purcell Room barely a third full.  I couldn’t tell if that was a reflection of poor advertising, or a sign of limited numbers of people willing to engage in thinking analytically about Emin’s art.  But I digress; let me outline what you missed.

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The first three speakers discussed matters of style, the second part consisted of three papers about content.  Interestingly, the division was also of gender, with three men in the first part and three women in the second. Could that be considered a trend? Each part concluded with a panel discussion.

Professor Mark Durden (University of Wales), artist and curator of photography, discussed how Emin has traded the ‘low points’ of her life as art, and located that gritty realism within similar  contemporary artistic practice especially the photographs of Richard Billingham, and Boris Mikhailov who documents the ‘new’ Russian homeless in the post-Soviet era.

Glenn Adamson (Victoria and Albert Museum), considered the element of craft in Emin’s work. He focused on two issues: firstly Emin’s ‘craft/art’ work, specifically her recent tapestry BLACK CAT as an example within a long tradition of tapestry making. And secondly, the question: where is the mark of the artist if the making is not done by her? His analysis was pivoted around Ulrich Lehmann’s notion of the “artist as a trademark artistic persona”.

John White, by contrast, presented the most immediate insight into Emin’s formative student’s phase; White was her graphics tutor at Maidston College of Art, and is a practitioner.  By contemplating the nature of monotypes and by recreating the time and place during Emin’s student years there, he provided an interesting perspective on that chapter of her creative life – a period transferring vulnerability into creativity. For him, the monotypes represent the most direct, intimate and unique works of Emin, both for their content and the spontaneous nature of creating.

The poet, academic and literary reviewer, Alev Adil presented a paper close to her own life and interest considering the hybrid identity of Emin as Turkish-Cypriot and English. Adil discussed the various voices Emin employs in narrating, considering the actual, symbolic and political positions that the often absent father had within Emin’s life and work. Of particular interest was Adil’s probing into the relationships of national politics (Turkish) and personal familial ones, and the possibilities of reading these in Emin’s art.

Camilla Jalving (curator at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Denmark), presented a paper that relates closely to her recent publication Vaerk son Handling (Work as Action) on the performativity of contemporary art.  Her presentation touched on one of the issues that I am most interested in: the relationship between reality and performativity.

The final speaker Alexandra Kokoli presented a refreshingly strong feminist argument in which she looked at the gendered reception of women’s art. In particular she focused on the way that Emin’s art suffers from that gendering, which is further amplified by Emin’s autobiographical depiction. Kokoli concluded by questioning the extent to which Emin’s celebrity status in the UK had impacted the reviews and curatorial presentations of the retrospective.

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The panel discussions were illuminating and interesting, although for me there was too little time allocated for audience participation and discussion.  Another surprise was the confidence of several of the speakers that Emin has reached a level of recognition that would no longer attract either a misogynist or anti-postmodernist critical reception. My personal experience is that outside the artworld, and even often within it, there remains a strong resistance to considering Emin on artistic merit. Even the paucity of attendance of the study day might be an indication of how specialized and narrow is the interest in her artistic value.

Just in case the small audience was due to obscure publicity, let me flag here the next events in case you might be interested: July 10th: Ali Smith will present a talk at 7.45pm / August 20th: a selection of Emin’s videos and films at 6pm; plus the wonderful Louisa Buck gives her tour of the exhibition 21 July, 6.30pm.

NEDIRA YAKIR

Jago footnotes: Tracey Emin’s Desert Island Discs here / www.southbankcentre.co.uk / Dr. Yakir’s review will be published here shortly.

The Urban Wastelands Project brings together new work by Day Bowman in collaboration with filmmaker Ian Knox and music by TransGlobal Underground. Heading up this year’s Frome Arts Festival, the exhibition opens at Black Swan Arts on 1st July and runs until the end of August.

A continuation of Bowman’s fascination with Britain’s working shores, industrialised and post-industrialised coastlines – the waste zones, as she calls them – this iteration of the project includes “an ‘Edgelands’ vista of gasometers, abandoned water pipes and barbed wire.

Katy Macleod introduced the project for Proof in 2008, noting:

“Day Bowman’s paintings within this project recollect what she has seen and noted of this land/seascape, of “things unordered, jumbled and junked”, the vast repositories of energy – gasometers and nuclear reactors – alongside warehouses, some with ugly histories. But the way in which such sources are used does not dwell on any literal or chronicled history, rather serving to catch a quickened sense of what such landscapes mean as they arrest attention when passed alongside or travelled through. Her series of paintings reconstruct in colour, line and form the experience of the huge, looming shapes when seen quickly, the hugeness and hubris registering on nerve ends.”

And in his insightful foreword to the new show, Mel Gooding writes:

” Day Bowman continues to look with great intensity through the prism of painting at the neglected landscapes at the edges of the contemporary urban world. These terrains vagues bear desolate testimony to the immediate past, to recent times of industrial activity, of human use and travail, of productivity and excess. They are poignant and sometimes distressing monuments to possibilities exploited and potentialities exhausted. They are thereby emblematic (as are all ruins) of a recurrent condition, signifying the entropic energies inherent in any civilisation.  They speak with a special eloquence to our time and place, as we contemplate the decline of industrialism in the West, and the evocative American term ‘rust belt’ seems apt to our own post-industrial landscapes. These zones, wrote the great Spanish architect-theorist, Ignasi de Solà-Morales, are “foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative.”’

Urban Wastelands opens 1 July, at Black Swan Arts, Frome

www.fromefestival.co.uk / 01373 455420

Ione Rucquoi: Lamb of god; C type print with gold leaf transfer

Welcome to a selection of exhibitions opening in London featuring five women artists whose work I’ve admired for some time.

First up, Shadowside opened last night at Blackall Studios (73 Leonards St EC2A). With a presentation of work including both Ione Rucquoi (left) and Beth Carter, the Bath-based gallery bo lee continue to present new work with a strong narrative.

I first came across Rucquoi’s work when she submitted an early self-portrait, My Cock and I,  to the Exeter Contemporary Open in 2006. Fellow judges Jeremy Diggle, Jem Southam and I chose the photograph for the final; we all remarked on both the skill of her work with prostheses and the sense of something yet unresolved in the presentation. (Rucquoi went on to win ECO in 2007. Did anyone see our ’06 winner Barry Cawston with his Tibetan Cowboy in the heavingly awful BBC programme Show me the Monet?)

Since then, Rucquoi has developed her vision of the portrait to embrace a landscape and extend the narrative of her characterisation. In recent work, the bodies of her models are inextricably situated within a canvas – painted, extended and poised for the photograph. She has a solo show coming up in July at the bowie gallery, and I’m looking forward to discussing her work in more detail then.

Kate Walters: Sensitive Dog with Child bundle; watercolour

Staying off the beaten track, Kate Walters is part of a new show at the atmospheric Crypt Gallery, in St Pancras Church NW1. With painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, Totem includes performance and sound, examining ‘the death and rebirth of instinct’.

Walters works with watercolours on thick smooth paper which she prepares herself. When Proof featured an extract from her studio journal in 2007, she described the inherent delicacy, the gentleness of watercolour – “a limit, an edge, a boundary to the invisible, the felt, the known, the unknown, the yet-to-be-known…holding the invisible, giving it physical life.” Professor Penny Florence has written  about the cadmium colours Walter uses to such effect here and I can think of no better recommendation to go and see her work.

Also coming up in the Crypt at the beginning of July, performance artist Sarah King is part of a group exhibition, Surface. Following an impressive graduate show at the University of Plymouth, where her exquisite stitched drawings were a stand-out moment, King continues to explore through stitch the rhythms and rituals marking the passage of time.

Meanwhile, Nedira Yakir will be reviewing the Tracey Emin show at the Hayward, available here later this week. Ben Lewis loved the show, Brian Sewell (too predictably) hated it. Surprisingly, the study day this week in the South Bank’s Purcell Room was sparsely attended despite the high calibre presentations. Dr Yakir thinks we have a complex relationship with Emin, whose work is so deeply immersed in her sense of self that as viewers we struggle to dissociate her intense, ruthless even, personal scrutiny from our observation of her media persona. Soon as I can prise it out of Dr. Yakir’s head, I’ll post it here full speed / Jago

There will be a further Blast of exhibitions coming up in the South West, and you can sign up for the bi-weekly national exhibition update by emailing info@isendyouthis.com