Tracy Emin's art appears as a tautology: her art is her life, her history, and vice versa. It has meaning only insofar as Emin herself does. She recreates her past, memorializes it, and weaves it into a narrative performance. Casting herself as the star of her own seriocomic life, she literally re-inscribes it as objects: banners, quilts, chairs, bags, and a tent. She also makes videos, etchings and paintings, and writes books and poetry as the divide between autobiographical confessional is always open to the public as the divide between art and life is willfully collapsed.

In 1993 Emin ran 'The Shop' - a kind of art boutique in East London - with fellow artist Sarah Lucas. There they created objects such as a 'Rothko Comfort Blanket' and Damien-Hirst's-face ashtrays. In 1994 Emin had her first solo show at White Cube, London, entitled 'My Major Retrospective', where she exhibited her diaries, letters and memorabilia, as well as miniature photographs of her old paintings from college. This exhibition inaugurated Emin's art of confession as catharsis, with her charismatic narratives of pain, love, abuse and survival, subsequently evidenced in her birth-to-adolescence book Exploration of the Soul.

Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1963-1995) is a blue tent appliquéd with the names of Emin's bedmates - from family members and sexual partners to foetus she aborted. The work is a kind of archeology of variously intimate relations within the confines of a 'confessional' shelter. Also in 1995, Emin founded her eponymous Museum, located in Waterloo Road, London, as a site for her own exhibitions and performances.

Tracey Emin graduated from Maidstone College of Art in 1986. In 1997 she had a solo exhibition, entitled 'I Need Art Like I Need God', at the South London Gallery