Tracey Emin's tent burnt down, but she's back with a show

If only more celebs -- especially women -- were as full of bollocks as Tracey Emin. Here in an article from the Guardian, the Brit Artist and Provocateur chats away.

"Tracey Emin tells me she is officially the 41st most disliked person in Britain. There she was, dozing on her sofa one evening when she heard her name mentioned on the television in one of those awful list programmes, and awoke to find she had made it into the Top 50 of the unpopular charts. 'Can you imagine?', she says, looking half-honoured, half-appalled. 'I mean, what if you were on the brink of suicide at that very moment, all alone in your house? That's the sort of thing that's going to push you over the edge, isn't it?' She shakes her head. 'Or, maybe', she says, eyes twinkling, 'save your life.'

In Tracey's case, one suspects, it would definitely be the latter. She is, it hardly needs saying, a survivor, and her often harrowing struggle with the world, and with herself, is the narrative that threads through all her work. It's all there - the teenage rapes, the abortions, the cruel and tender boyfriends, the depressions and suicide attempts, the memory of them stitched into her angry, appliqu.d quilts, dragged up though her scratchy, sad drawings, writ large in her scrawled, dysfunctional sentences that look like they have been scratched into the paper as if her life depended upon it. 'My world is my experience,' she says, 'and what I experience comes back into my work.'

Today, though, perhaps because she is working, she is mostly calm and measured. It is just a week before her big show of new work opens at White Cube, called, in typical Tracey fashion, 'When I think about sex...', and she is sitting in a corner of what she calls her 'baby studio' in London's East End - where there are no phones, no distractions save some soft music - drawing little figures on tiny paper circles. She makes it clear at least twice what an honour it is for me to be allowed into her creative sanctuary. The vaulted roof makes it looks like a tiny church but actually, she tells me proudly, this is the building where the Bryant & May match girls formed their trade union.

Big canvases lean against the side walls, paintings she has just started, or painted over and started again. One says 'TRACEY NO' in big gothic letters, the paint falling in purple streaks over the Eminesque signature, a nude female torso, legs agape. Another has the word 'Motorino' across the top, which Tracey says is 'just sexy'. We both squint at a third, trying to make out the topsy-turvy words, written, she says, 'like when you are a kid and you try to design album covers'. It says, I finally decipher, 'Wis I Was'. 'Fuck it!' says Tracey, squinting at the canvas, 'I left out an H!' She shakes her head. 'That's what happens when you start fucking around with your work at four in the morning.'

These days, though, Tracey is more likely to spend time at home with her cat than out on the razzle with her mates - 'my ideal is to go out and enjoy myself over four glasses of champagne'. She insists she 'never ever took drugs', and she has recently quit smoking and given up coffee. 'Ten years ago, I'd have run a mile from people like me,' she says, cackling into her tea, 'but now, I swear to God, the convent beckons.'

Just back from a holiday in Marrakesh, she looks tanned and healthy, though she says she has put on a stone and a half, which suits her. She tells me three times that she has not had sex in two years, since she split up with her last boyfriend, the artist Matt Collishaw. This may help explain the title of her show, which, in full, reads 'When I think about sex, I think about men, women, dogs, violence, group sex and i love you all'.

Despite the characteristically colourful title, the work is mainly white. 'It's going to be mottled mostly,' she says, 'and that's an understatement.' To this end, there will be 'some very large white blankets with embroideries of my drawings, two white neon signs, one with the long title of the show, one with the dot-dot-dot version, plus some tiny paintings and drawings. Oh, and a sculpture of a rollercoaster that will divide the space in two.' The rollercoaster sounds like a metaphor for the Tracey we know and either love or hate, but I tell her that all this white sounds suspiciously spiritual. She nods, as if I might be on to something, then she tells me that one of the blankets is called Super Drunk Bitch. No change there, then.

'It's a conversation with myself about being drunk,' she says, adding that she just doesn't enjoy being drunk any more. The turning point came when she mutated into her inebriated and obnoxious self at a friend's party recently, and had to be ejected. Earlier in the night, she had fallen over while dancing, and suddenly found herself 'skidding across the floor like a frisbee, my face going dakka-dakka-dakka-dak, and all this blood everywhere. It was like, Oh for fuck's sake, Tracey, get a grip.'

Given that the British love a survivor, it has always seemed odd to me that Tracey Emin should be so vilified, and that so many people reacted with undisguised glee when her famous tent was lost in the MoMart fire.

'I got so much flak at one point,' she says, looking pained. 'After I was nominated for the Turner in 1999, I had four months of being told I was crap. And a really bad role model for young people. Every bloody week. I mean, if someone said that about your writing, you'd take it on board, wouldn't you?' I tell her she must have been doing something right, but she's having none of it. 'Four months solid of people telling you what you've have been doing for your whole life is shit, it's not really good or healthy, is it? It's fucking horrible, in fact.'

For a while back there, it did seem like her work was a repository for all the philistinism, mean-spiritedness and class snobbery of modern Britain, the undercurrents that even Blair's attempts at cultural rebranding cannot quite disguise. Tracey, of course, has a much simpler explanation. 'It's the way I speak, innit?' she says, exaggerating her accent, which would once have been called working-class, 'People take the piss out of my accent all the time. They don't seem to like my voice. In fact, I think a lot of people in this country wish people like me didn't have one, full stop. But, my intellect and my capabilities are a lot stronger than people perceive. Of course,' she says, grinning, 'that winds them up, too.'

When Tracey Emin smiles, her face softens and brightens and crinkles up, and you catch a glimpse of the tough little Margate tyke she once was. In Tate Britain, she currently has a room of her own, an achievement of which she is immensely proud. On one wall, right in the middle of her epic work Exploration of the Soul, there's a photograph of the young Tracey wearing a twinkly grin full of defiance and attitude. There is still more than a trace of that defiant child in Tracey Emin, of course, in her tantrums and her strops, in her cockiness that can turn to defensiveness in a heartbeat, in her work that, at one extreme, shouts out for all your attention, and, at the other, less remarked upon, extreme, sneaks up on you and makes you, just for a moment, see the big, bad world though her unblinking eyes.

In November, her first novel, Strangelands, will be published. How long did it take her to write? 'Twenty-five years,' she says, without a moment's hesitation, 'I gave my editor, Nicholas Blincoe, four big boxes of my writings, and he's edited it down. It's in three parts: "Motherland", which is Margate and all that, "Fatherland", which is all my weird Turkish stuff, and "Traceyland", which is the last 10 years, basically.'

Recently, too, she has become a weekly column writer for the Independent. She has written about how she didn't vote Labour for the first time in her life, about her cat Docket's birthday, and about how her biological clock is ticking ominously loudly. 'I'm 42, and I would really like to meet someone and have a baby, but what are the chances of that?' she asks. 'I mean, suppose you and me fell in love right now and we went round the corner to my place and had a shag. What's the chances of me getting pregnant, and us staying in love? Not very high, are they? Pretty fucking low, in fact. So, I've put all that out of my head, really. At least until I can find someone who can physically and intellectually stimulate me. I want my brain to be fucked as well. That's just as important.'

Now that she's rich and famous, I say, why doesn't she come to an arrangement with one of her ex-boyfriends or intellectual mates, then bring the baby up on her own? 'I think I'd be good at that,' she says, as if she'd already given this some thought, 'but I've spent all my life trying not to be a single parent, so it seems a bit odd all of a sudden to be considering that option.'

She falls silent for a moment, then bursts into life again. 'You know what?' she says, 'I swear to you on my life that something is going to change dramatically after this show. I don't know what, but I know it's going to happen. I can feel it.'

In your life, I ask, or in your work? 'Well, it's the same, innit?' she says. 'I always say that I start off with myself, then I go out into the universe, then I come back to me again. I'm in my own orbit,' she continues, free-associating in a way that makes you believe she really does live in a self-created universe called Eminworld. 'That's why I'm untouchable really when it comes to all this celebrity stuff - A-list, B-list, C-list, shit-list, it doesn't really affect me.'

Nevertheless, she is now a bona fide celebrity, and seems to be happy enough in that surreal and glitzy merry-go-round, what with her designer clothes and A-list friends. 'Well, Frida Kahlo was a celebrity,' she retorts, sounding slightly miffed, 'and Warhol. What about Louise Bourgeois? She's a 94-year-old celebrity.' I want to tell her I was simply commenting, not accusing, but she's off now. 'I suppose the fact that I'm seen as a celebrity has gone against my chances of being in the next Documenta,' she laughs, pretending she doesn't give a hoot, when, of course, she does. 'And I know some curators and art historians think that art and celebrity just don't mix, but I say, "Join the 21st century." You don't have to be starving in a garret any more. I mean, nobody goes on about it when blokes wear nice clothes. Anselm Kiefer? He has a nice house, nice clothes. Gilbert & George, beautiful house, beautiful tailor-made suits. All those, I forget their names, big German guys with their cigars and Armani suits, what's the fucking problem?'

Before I leave, she shows me some of her new drawings, beautiful scratchy things, self-portraits mainly, though not as graphic or as painful as her earlier work in the same vein. 'I might show these ones all together,' she says, 'and I've collected all the stones that people threw though the window of my old studio. That could work well together in a show.'

Hang on, I say, people actually threw stones into your studio? 'That used to happen a lot,' she says, 'I've kept them all, of course. It's a vision of hell, sometimes, being me,' she says, almost smiling, but not quite. 'Then again, I was just thinking the other day that I now live on the street that I've always wanted to live in. There's not many people that happens to, right? When I was young, I always used to plan five years ahead. People would say, why do you do that? And I'd say, it's wishful thinking because I don't want to be here in five years.'

So you could say you've wished yourself here? 'Yeah, you could say that, but I've fucking worked hard, too. People tend to forget that.' Still raging, then, still dreaming, one senses that it will be a long time before Tracey Emin makes it through those convent gates."

YOU GO, girl.