Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an artist, Her work is sensational. Indeed one of her most famous works,

a tent called everyone I have ever slept with, was a centerpiece of the famous Royal Academy

exhibition Sensation in 1997. Two years later she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize

for work which included my bed and evocation of a period of breakdown including stained

knickers and used condoms. She attracts critical

approval and vitriol not always in equal measure and takes not

unreasonably some delight in the controversy that her art engenders.

Much of it is based on her own complicated life.

She was raped as an adolescent,

became promiscuous, and has attempted suicide.

Like it or loathe it, the impact of her work is impossible to ignore.

Kews form wherever it's shown around the world, and she has a room dedicated to it in Tate

Britain.

My struggle, she says, has been with my art and my own personal survival, and it's all linked.

She is Tracy Emmin.

So how much has your art,, which is so autobiographical, so

confessional that saved you from yourself if you like? It's been a kind of therapy

for you, huh? I think it started off like that. I always say I'm not the best visual artist in the world and I really mean that.

What I like about my art and what's kept me going is the fact that it's about communication and that's where the survival is.

While I'm making my art and I'm communicating then I'm obviously not alone and that's what's important to me.

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