Love is what we all want

Yesterday I went to visit Tracey Emin’s Love is what you want at the Hayward Gallery.

I really enjoyed the show. It was long and exhausting but totally worth it.I didn’t know much about Tracey Emin. only that she was famous, British and controversial, friends with Sarah Lucas and had an interesting face. I knew she had various neon pieces and I had seen pictures of some of her blankets and the famous “My bed”. But her work never really interested me much, I had seen some pictures in books and found it a bit childish I don’t know why. However, yesterday she touched me like few artist have touched me. Her massive homey blankets were impressive live, hanging on the tall walls and screaming all sort of messages of despair, love and rage. The black wall full of neon hand written notes was beautiful and energetic.

I really loved the room with family and friends. The little super8 piece of her dad in the beach made my skin tremble, maybe because I have my own dad story, but I just found it exquisitely simple and touching.

The friends part? I grew up in a family that I discovered it was made of friends. My mother used to be continuously surrounded by her friends, that were also my friends, and treated me just like one of them, or at least this is how I felt. So I always like it when people include their friends into their artistic life. I love to include and work with friends in my films too.

Sometimes I feel maybe I’d be happier creating in the arts, I miss the freedom. But then I remember the feeling of getting out the cinema after watching a good movie and I know this is what I want to do: creating this feeling in someone else.

So I recommend go and see her work live wherever you can as there is no comparison with seeing it in a book. Her work is just emotion and you need to be close to it.

Friends and artists Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin in the shop the opened together.