Abstract
This paper will evaluate how Tracey Emin has explored her Turkish Cypriot heritage in her work. Those familiar with Emin’s art will know her troubled and colourful life story because her art is viscerally autobiographical, insistently confessional. The offspring of an affair between a married Turkish Cypriot man and a beautiful young English woman, Tracey and her twin brother Paul grew up in Margate, initially in rather gothic grandeur then, following her father’s bankruptcy, in increasing poverty and squalour. Emin’s art fictionalises as much as it reveals, employing intimacy, hyperbole and abjection in her installations and films; weaving a palimpsest of dream, fantasy, alienation and innocence in her writing. This paper will explore how Emin’s understanding of and approach to her Turkish Cypriot identity can be read as an extension of her troubled but tender relationship with her father. I will also explore the unspoken political upheavals that mark her personal history, Tracey was born a few months before war broke out in Cyprus, and consider wider questions around diasporic identities, and Turkish Cypriot diasporic identity in England in particular, raised by her work.
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