Confessions: What I did in Tracey Emin’s bed

My OCD manifests at its most extreme with the control of my bed. Every night I orbit my mattress on my hands and knees. The first orbit involves pulling each corner of the under-sheet taught. The following orbit, each length. The final orbit deals with any remaining laxness. I then test the tautness by gently rolling into the centre. If wrinkles emerge, the orbital process is repeated (usually three times) until I deem the bed sleepable.

“Fuck painting! If only I spent as much time painting as I do decreasing my under-sheet maybe I’d have a career by now?!” I think as I stand in my boxers, hands on hips, appreciating my most recent masterpiece. I have perfected a repetitive, inescapable, un-showable art practice. If only I could just, I don’t know, put my bed in a gallery or something…

I had known of Tracey Emin’s My Bed for some time, even before experiencing it in the flesh. My Bed had always illustrated my deepest desire: to relinquish the maddening rituals, to sleep undisturbed in my own filth.

Limerence can erupt in many forms, with any individual, object, or subject becoming the focus of obsession. There was something about the aggressive simplicity and directness of Emin’s early work that obsessed me, something about her voice that swaddled me in safety.

When I was 16, I used to go out in Dalston. The parties would finish around 4 am and the first train back to Romford would start at 6 am, leaving two hours on Sunday morning to roam around Liverpool Street. One night, I found myself standing outside Tracey Emin’s Spitalfields studio at 5.30 am, desperately intoxicated and staring up at the windows. I’d discovered its location when I glimpsed a familiar Sainsbury’s in a documentary. I started screaming her name at the top of my lungs, desperate to make contact in any way. There was no reply.

A year later, I am standing before My Bed at the Tate Britain. A suffocating electricity bent the air. The magnetism of the work could have ripped the Turners from the walls. There was a shocking smell: even after 17 years, the sweet and unmistakable stench of depression leaked from the sculpture. My eyes flickered, taking stock of the innumerable objects that littered the familiar blue carpet. I imagined an assistant painstakingly categorising and filing each object into ziplock bags: each dirty tissue, each condom, each used tampon. But was each object really catalogued and recorded? Reality can’t be frozen, surely; the objects must fluctuate – a dirty tissue retired and a new one reinstated. Could a foreign object disguise itself among the masses?

The bed sent every branch of my OCD into the most delicious downward spiral. I lost control. Suddenly, my hand rifled through my bag and retrieved my notebook. As if by divine intervention, I scribbled my name across the page, ripped it out and crumpled it in my sweaty palm. The invigilator was distracted and in one swift movement I threw my crumpled desires into the pile of rubbish that littered the bed. I walked out as sweat dripped from my brow, proud of my contribution.

In the seconds I watched my name float gently into the work, I felt I could never make any work about a bed in Emin’s monolithic shadow. I wanted to claim some form of ownership over a work that so beautifully expressed my own reality. Most importantly, I needed to make contact with Tracey.

All artists have an obsession: with colour, a subject, a muse, a lover, coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, sex. The impact lies not in the obsession itself, but in the ability to translate that obsession into an aesthetic object. It’s the simple act or declaration that allows us to recognise that obsession within ourselves. My obsession was with Tracey and the ball of paper was my declaration.

PS. Tracey Emin, if you’re reading this, could you check if my piece of paper is in a ziplock bag somewhere in a Tate storage unit? Thank you.