Artist Tracey Emin has revealed that she married a stone last summer. Dressed in her father’s funeral shroud, 53-year old Tracey wed an ancient rock that lies underneath an olive tree in the garden outside her south of France studio. There was no bridal party and we’re assuming she skipped the cake and bouquet too.
Tracey said she felt an unrelenting desire to commemorate her relationship with the stone after finding a wedding ring in her studio. Liking the look of the piece of jewelry, she put it on before remembering it was bad luck to wear a wedding ring unless you’re getting married. Luckily the Turner Prize nominated artist had a convenient object of affection close by.
“I thought the stone is so majestic and beautiful, I really do love the stone,” she commented to the South China Morning Post. Continuing, “I thought about the way I love, how I pour love into things and people, whatever it is, passionately, but not expecting it to be returned either. I just accept that’s the way it is, it’s just me who gives. The stone becomes a metaphor for my feeling.”
While there is no word on how the rock is serving her as a spouse, it’s clearly an effective muse. The marriage has inspired her latest show, I Cried Because I Love You, an exhibition that is currently being held across two Hong Kong galleries.
Tracey, who has never shied away from making her feelings public works of art, confessed that she knows on the surface her marriage to the inanimate might sound “pretentious and stupid.” But she insists the pairing actually represents the fact that love for her, is growing increasingly more spiritual with age.
It’s a theme she’s explored previously in her 1995 work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995. The piece included the names of everyone she’s ever literally slept with — including her gran — as a statement of love being a multifaceted emotion that isn’t automatically tied in with sexuality. Sadly that piece was destroyed in the 2004 Momart London warehouse fire.
Perhaps the destruction of her former work was a supporting reason to marry a stone — after all, that’s gotta be a love that will last forever.
Credits
Photography Piers Allardyce [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons