A searing and sensual visualisation of personal memory, I want you so much from 2015 is a shining example of Tracey Emin’s deeply contemplative corpus of work. Emin’s trademark loose brushstrokes are transformed into wide black stitching, puncturing the bone-white calico to reveal the artist’s body. The head of the body is hidden, scribbled over and devoured into a cloud of black swathes of fabric. Emin captures snapshots of pain, love, violence and grief within each stitch, coiling each emotion tightly between layers of soft cloth. The completed work is the outcome of Emin’s internal work - of remembering, ruminating, and contemplating.

Emin revisits embroidery and textiles at many points across her vast and celebrated career. One of her most well-known sculptures, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95, saw the artist embroider the names of everyone she had shared a bed with onto the inside of a tent. Emin would cut up old clothes imbued with sent.mes ntal value, before physically stitching them into a quilt, square by square. This laborious process offers a compelling metaphor for the artist’s attempt at piecing together fragments of her past, a theme which has continued into her stitched self-portraits. Each puncture into the fabric in I want you so much represents a moment of t.mes , processed through the manual manipulation of organic material, heavy with the weight of Emin’s lived experiences.

Emin has described her practice as being about “rites of passage, of t.mes and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone.”By re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques—or ‘women’s work’—for radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the ‘personal as political’. In I want you so much, Emin allows viewers to engage with her innermost world, a self-reflective dialogue conveyed through both the yearning nature of the title and the abstractness of her mark making. Taking inspiration from expressionist painters Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, Emin’s work is uninhibited in the way it absorbs and reflects her internal state.