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