Tracey Emin carried around a giant tote decades before enormous handbags were fashionable. “Ironic now, thinking about that, right?” she says, in her soft, working-class-accent, on a chilly afternoon, as she tries to find a comfortable position on a sofa in her recently renovated townhouse on Fitzroy Square, a genteel, central-London pocket that was once home to both Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw. She reaches into the large canvas carryall at her feet to pull out a plastic pouch of urine, which is connected under her loose cotton shift by a long tube to a stoma in her abdomen. She waves it slightly, a white flag, maybe, though because this is Emin, surrender has never been an option. “I made them leave my clitoris,” she says.

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Persons: Tracey Emin, Stella Artois, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Emin Organizations: tote, Young British Artists, Lights Locations: London, Fitzroy, New York