Visited Tracey Emin 'Love Is What You Want' at the Hayward Gallery

A rushed but sublime hour and a half with our Trace at 'Love is What You Want' at the Hayward Gallery.  The blankets in the first part of the show are my favourites - her illiteracy  and the way she takes scattered phrases from her own and her friends and families lives makes them work like huge visual poems.   I find them verbally and visually rich, intimate and public at the same time.  I hear she's learning to spell. I can't blame her - we all need to move on - but it is so distinctive to her work it feels like a tiny bit of a shame. The neon gallery was a bit weird - I guess it must be hard to show, but it looked like a zoo - you feel that all the pieces would be great in their own habitat but were slightly depressed by being crammed together. 

Sometimes felt like there was a bit too much of the drawings - central though they are to her work, and beautiful and shocking too, I found myself skipping these most often in my whistle stop tour (I was picking up work form Parallax Art Fair and only had a short time to go round).  But then again they are quiet compared to some of her other work, so maybe this was just a function of the short time I had - you tend to gravitate to work that grabs you by the throat.  Newer work I missed out on as it was towards the end of my tour and I had to split before really getting a good look at it. Something to go back to. The show is on till the 29th August I believe, and I certainly recommend it.

Jump to Victoria Scholes' website