Tracey Emin's I Need Tomorrow: Entirely Unintentional. Entirely Emin.
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
Milla Peerutin
On Wednesday evening at the London Original Print Fair, Counter Editions unveiled a suite of six new lithographs, entitled I Need Tomorrow, by Tracey Emin. This comes as a complete shock to many, even Emin herself, following her landmark retrospective, A Second Life currently on show at the Tate Modern. By the time most people heard of the series, they had almost entirely already sold out.
I Need Tomorrow was born without intention, in complete happenstance and in a moment of waiting. Emin had arrived at Counter Editions’ Margate studio with the object to complete a singular print but, while waiting for it to proof, had produced five additional pieces. "I can't tell you how happy it made me doing it," she says. "So it just took me by surprise."
Printmaking has always held a specific and special place in her practice. It is one of the few mediums that does not fully answer to her with a kind of freedom not easily granted by other forms of making. “Because of the alchemy, and the fluidity, and because of the chance involved. There's a kind of magic and I really, really love it."
Emin works across painting, sculpture and the written word – her artworks always emotionally raw, hauntingly intimate and a type of vulnerable not often seen or felt. Printmaking affords her something those other mediums do not: the image that lifts from the press is never entirely the one that went in – it's a moment of chance, unpredictability with something unexpected always arriving in its place. For an artist whose entire practice is built on the directness of the personal mark, that surrender is not a limitation. It is, she says, the entire point.
The six hand-pulled lithographs are blue and black, each depicting a reclining figure: the artist, her body loosely rendered, dissolving at its edges into the surface around her. Emin describes them as "full of energy and full of life, brush marks, everything," and has said she wishes she could paint the same way. Published in editions of 50 and priced at £12,000 each, the complete boxset is housed in a cloth-bound navy portfolio.
The blue is what stays with you. Where it pools, the stone resists it; where the ink runs thin, it lifts, ranging from pale wash to something almost violent in its density. In one print it floods the space almost entirely; in another it barely grazes the figure. It is the colour of a process not entirely under control, of something that suddenly arrived rather than something chosen. Grief and tenderness at once, without explaining either. That is, perhaps, the most Emin thing about the whole series.
The title of each piece: You Never Made Me Sad. I Kept Dreaming of You. Because It's You. I Missed Every Single Part of You. Alive in The Cave. I Need Tomorrow is something of a love story and what Emin refers to as a gift to herself. Yet, five of the six titles are addressed outward, to a "you" she never identifies. That unresolve is, characteristically, where the work finds itself. I Need Tomorrow finds you in an unguarded moment; in bed at 3am, or in someone's arms. Emin has always known how to do this: to make something so specific to her own experience that it becomes, without explanation, yours too.
This title is not incidental either. Emin was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020, underwent major surgery, and lives with a stoma bag. "We all need tomorrow," she said this week. "Because after being so ill for a long time, it's good that I know that tomorrow will come for me and I don't have to be worried about it. So the title is very significant, but it's a love story, the whole thing."
Emin says the print series is a gift to herself. Yet each title is addressed to someone else. That is the gap where I Need Tomorrow lives: between the self-directed and the outward-reaching, between survival and longing, between a series nobody planned and one that sold before most people saw it. Entirely unintentional. Entirely Emin.
I Need Tomorrow is on show at the London Original Print Fair, Somerset House, until Sunday 17 May. Remaining individual prints are available via Counter Editions at countereditions.com.
