Save Me

Born in London in 1963 to an English mother and Turkish Cypriot father, Emin grew up in Margate, where she first became attracted to the bright neon signs of the seaside resort town. She studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London, before her breakthrough as one of the Young British Artists of the 1990s. Since that time Emin has risen to become an internationally recognised doyenne of contemporary art, in 2007 selected to represent Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

The scrawling cursive purple-and-red palette of Save Me, 2018, harks back to the artist’s first-ever neon sign for the façade of her eponymous museum – The Tracey Emin Museum – which she ran in a small shop on busy Waterloo Road, London, between 1995 and 1997. Emin has repeatedly used electric neon since then, illuminating and scaling-up her poetic handwritten excerpts in a medium usually employed for commercial signage and advertising. The artist’s ‘diaristic’ one-liners emphasise her attentiveness to language and the personal narratives applied to her practice. Pastel-coloured light tubes are shaped to mimic Emin’s own handwriting, spelling out her declarations of love, desire, fear or disappointment.

The ambiguous quality of the phrase, ‘Save Me’, renders it open to many readings – from a silent but burning plea by the artist herself, to one collectively echoed and universally felt.