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A Perfect Place to Grow 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 International1993 (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. 

1) Tracey Emin, A Perfect Place to Grow, 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), 2590 x 2950 x 2000 mm, 2001 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

2) Tracey Emin: Hotel International & Tracey Emin in bed, lying under Hotel International, with Jay Jopling at the Gramercy Hotel, New York, 1993, © Steve Brown / Courtesy White Cube

3-5) Tracey Emin, Sometimes the dress is worth more money than the money, film, 2000

6)  Tracey Emin, A name they called our dad , 2002, embroidery and text on paper

7) Tracey Emin, Dad, 1993, 4 photographs, colour, Chromogenic print, on paper, ink on paper, wood, glass and resin block, dimensions variable 

8) Tracey Emin, Hotel International, 1993, applique quilt, 257 x 240 cm. Private Collection, New York.