- Artist
- Tracey Emin born 1963
- Medium
- Wooden birdhouse with metal roof, wooden steps, wooden trestle, plastic watering can, plants and film, super 8, shown as video, monitor, colour and sound (mono)
- Dimensions
- Displayed: 2590 × 2950 × 2000 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 2004
- Reference
- T11791
Summary
This work pays homage to the artist’s Turkish Cypriot father who, she says, is a fantastic gardener but a terrible carpenter. It consists of a wooden birdhouse-like structure on wooden stilts. The little wooden chamber has a sloping corrugated iron roof and an old wooden stepladder attached to the side which the viewer is invited to ascend in order to look through a small peephole. Inside the birdhouse a short video loop plays (originally shot on super-8 but transferred to DVD). It features Emin’s father walking back and forth through vegetation in a bright, hot sun. Wearing a pair of blue bathing trunks and a cloth sun-hat, he pushes through the fronds of tall, swaying, reed-like plants. He approaches the camera carrying a pink dahlia in one hand, which he extends towards the viewer. After smiling and blowing a kiss, he turns and walks away, his brown back disappearing into the foliage. The same footage repeats with a red flower held in the other hand. The sound of cicadas chirruping loudly in the heat accompanies the visual drama. On the floor beside the hut on stilts is a single wooden trestle, constructed by Emin’s father, surrounded by flowering plants in pots such as geraniums, clematis and lilies and a green plastic watering can. The artist has stipulated that this should be full of water because she likes the idea that she could come into the gallery and water the plants herself.
Much of Emin’s work features members of her family as well as death and depression. The words ‘the perfect place to grow’ originally appeared on Emin’s first quilt, Hotel International 1993 (private collection), appliquéd below the name of the Margate hotel once owned by Emin’s father, Hotel International. In her text work, Exploration of the Soul 1994 (Tate T11887), Emin describes the idyllic early years she and her twin brother Paul spent at ‘the giant hotel’ before bankruptcy forced her father to sell it and return to Cyprus. The separation of her parents was the impetus for a series of disappointments followed by intense disillusionment with life as a result of being raped at the age of thirteen. The Perfect Place to Grow may therefore be read as harking back to a kind of ideal beginning before the shattering exodus from childhood paradise and the severance of paternal relations. An earlier work, Emin & Emin. Cyprus 1996 1996 (the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London), is a video featuring the artist and her father emerging from the sea on the Turkish Cypriot coast, providing a romantic testimony to reconnection between the artist and her father. The Perfect Place to Grow reaffirms this connection with greater power. Envar Emin not only participates as an actor; he has constructed part of the installation. His presentation of flowers represents a type of old fashioned chivalry and perhaps, in Freudian terms, a daughter’s fantasy for her father as her knight. Like Emin & Emin. Cyprus 1996, the work alludes nostalgically to the Cypriot Mediterranean climate as well as an idealisation of the father-daughter relationship.
Structurally, The Perfect Place to Grow recalls a work by French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) comprising a wooden door set in an arch of brick. Two small holes at eye level in the wooden door invite the viewer to look onto a landscape in which a female figure lies prone, legs spread and head hidden behind the wall of brick. Duchamp’s work, Etant Donnés: 1º la chute d’eau / 2º le gaz d’éclairage (1944-66, Philadelphia Museum of Art), is sinister and deathly. By contrast, Emin’s installation is life-affirming and positive. Although he is enclosed in the bird house, her father is a source of loving and giving, healing the artist’s wound of childhood separation and inverting traditionally gendered roles of spectator and object of desire.
Further reading:
Tracey Emin, Exploration of the Soul, London 2003
‘Tracey Emin’, Parkett, no.63, 2001, pp.22-63, p.45
Ten Years: Tracey Emin, exhibition catalogue, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 2002, reproduced pp.20-1 in colour
Elizabeth Manchester
November 2004
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.
Technique and condition
Technique and Condition Text
Emin, Tracey
The Perfect Place to Grow (2001)
T11791
The following entry is based on an interview between Tate and Tracey Emin 26 August, 2004 as well as the conservation record held in Sculpture Conservation.
An interactive installation comprising the following reclaimed items: painted wood birdhouse a DVD player and monitor, step ladder, potted live plants, plastic watering can and wood trestle.
Inside the birdhouse door in black marker pen is written: 2003.1.32(1) SB/BK
A visitor can view the Super 8 film by climbing the ladder and looking through a drilled spy hole in the bird hose which contains the DVD player and monitor which is set on a continuous loop. The trestle and plants are positioned around the birdhouse. The layout is not variable. Emin wishes the watering can to be left filled with water so she can come into the gallery at any time to water the plants herself.
The birdhouse appears unstable and battered looking, in keeping with its homemade construction and use of recycled materials. However, the structure is stable and safe to use by visitors. If the plants die Emin wants them to be replaced with similar types.
Jodie Glen-Martin
August 2005.
Explore
- emotions, concepts and ideas(16,416)
-
- emotions and human qualities(5,345)
-
- memory(367)
- agriculture, gardening & fishing(951)
-
- bird house(4)
- watering can(31)
- metal, iron(63)
- metal, iron, corrugated(35)
- Emin, Enver(2)
- individuals: male(1,841)