Tracey Emin was born in Croydon, but brought up in Margate. She has a twin brother, Paul. Emin's father, an ethnic Turkish Cypriot, was married to a woman other than her mother and divided his time between his two families. He owned the Hotel International in Margate, and, when the business failed, Emin's family suffered a severe decline in their standard of living, circumstances which have featured in a number of works. Around the age of 13 she was raped or "broken in" as she describes the then-current term.

In 1993 Emin opened a shop with fellow artist Sarah Lucas, called simply The Shop in Bethnal Green. This sold works by the two of them, including T-shirts and ash trays with Damien Hirst's picture stuck to the bottom. Lucas paid Emin a wage to mind the shop and Emin also made extra money by writing letters to people asking them to invest £20 in her as an artist, one being Jay Jopling, who became her dealer.

During this period Emin was also working with the gallerist Joshua Compston.

In 1994 she had her first solo show at the White Cube gallery, a leading contemporary art gallery in London. It was called My Major Retrospective, and was what is now seen as typically autobiographical in her work, consisting of personal photographs, and photos of her (destroyed) early paintings, as well as items which most artists would not consider showing in public, such as a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when he was decapitated in a car crash. This willingness to show details of what would generally be thought of as her private life has become one of Emin's trademarks.

In the mid-1990s she had a relationship with Carl Freedman, who had been an early friend of, and collaborator with, Damien Hirst and who had co-curated seminal Britart shows, such as Modern Medicine and Gambler. In 1994 they toured the US together, driving in a Cadillac from San Francisco to New York, and making stops en route where she gave readings from her autobiographical book Exploration of the Soul to finance the trip. En route they "belly surfed" in San Diego and watched bears in Big Sur.

The couple also spent time by the sea in Whitstable together, using the beach hut, which she uprooted and turned into art in 1999 with the title The Last Thing I Said to You is Don't Leave Me Here, and which was destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire.

In 1995 Freedman curated the show Minky Manky at the South London Gallery. Emin has said, “At that time Sarah (Lucas) was quite famous, but I wasn’t at all. Carl said to me that I should make some big work as he thought the small-scale stuff I was doing at the time wouldn’t stand up well. I was furious. Making that work was my way at getting back at him”

In common with many YBAs, including Damien Hirst, Emin employs assistants for fabrication purposes, for example sewing the lettering onto her appliquéd pieces. She has commented on the pointlessness of carrying out such time-consuming work in person.

Work becomes art when it is defined as such by her. A poster she photocopied and put up around her home when her cat Docket went missing became an object collected by people, but was excluded by her from her canon. Similarly in 2002, Emin was commissioned to collaborate with children on an artwork in a primary school in North London. Pupils made the piece with her in Emin's style of sewing cut out letters onto a large piece of material. In 2004, the school enquired if Emin would sign the work so that the school could sell it as an original to raise funds. Emin refused and demanded the return of the tapestry, saying that it was not a piece of her art.

“Being an artist isn't just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it's some kind of communication, a message.”

Emin's work isn't always good (though it is always interesting). The piece that made her famous, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95 (1995), leaves you cold. The thought about why you don't like it. It's the tent. The tent is too crudely symbolic. The tent is womb, home, exile, intimacy, loneliness done out in nylon. Where's the mystery in the tent? Your 'e not altogether keen on a handful of Emin's video pieces, either.

Some are ill-disciplined and a couple straightforwardly bullying. In How It Feels (1996), she rambles formlessly on about her abortion, a particular trauma in her life, as though entitled to bore and have the viewer attend. But, then again, there are other video works I find astonishing. Emin's sketch Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) is a Roman candle of a work, evanescent and charming, so redolent of lost childhood you find it agonising and wonderful to watch. Don't Try to Sell Me Your Fucking Fear demonstrates that she has moved on some way since then. Her art remains located somewhere between the search for a self and its performance, but she seems to be willing and able to formulate her experience more broadly now, without having to produce its physical signifiers. Emin isn't likely to leave her life behind any time soon, but she is beginning to integrate other, wider elements into its expression. That is how a story about a leaflet and a cat becomes a comment on the atrocities of September 11, and a powerful one at that. The centrepiece of Emin's work is the unmade bed, which she created after spending a week in bed feeling suicidal. It is surrounded by the detritus of someone whose life appears to be falling apart. But her tartan slippers are arranged neatly and there is a place for her teddy bear. In spite of its confrontational aspect most commentators have seen the underlying innocence in her work." The walls are decorated with her thoughts "I'm not running away I'm saying goodbye" and "They all leave in the end baby, and then I'm afraid it's just me and you".

Another series of works are a group of painstakingly drafted drawings of Emin, once more wearing nothing but her birthday suit.

She said: "For this show I wanted to show that I can really draw, and I think they are really sexy drawings." In fact most of Emin's show - which will be unveiled tonight at the White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square - is about sex.

And in case the message isn't quite clear, its title is: When I Think About Sex.

Emin told the Standard: "I don't have sex, I make art. That's what I do."

But she added: "I think about sex when I'm making art." It is understood she is currently single.

Emin said she will be displaying her trademark embroidered blankets which are emblazoned with lines including: "Feel Me", "Right Up Inside Of Me" and " People Like You Need To F*** People Like Me". Emin insisted her exhibition is "not a hassled show - it's calm".

"And that's because I'm so mature as I toddle off into my twilight years," added the 41-year-old. One of her exhibits is a blanket showing an embroidered squadron of spermatazoa swimming towards her.

"Much as I'd like to have a baby, you've got to have sex or some sperm inside you to make that work," she said. The show will also include a large roller coaster track and a photograph of Emin, nude, with a plaster-cast on her leg.

Critics have argued that the personal nature of Emin's work is undermined by her employing a studio of assistants to produce the pieces. In 2002 Emin attracted further critics when she was commissioned to collaborate with children on a tapestry for a primary school in North London. After the project the school enquired if Emin would sign the piece so that the school could sell the tapestry as an original work to raise funds. Emin refused and demanded the return of the tapestry even though her authorship of the piece was disputed.

"I'd be walking down the street and people would shout out after me, 'Oi, you selfish cow, let them sell it, or give them the money!' I made a mistake by not talking to the press about it straight away, but talking to my solicitor instead. The school said they wanted to sell it because they couldn't afford to frame it, but my blankets hang in the Tate from a piece of wood, they don't bother to frame them."

Emin has been accused of cynically exploiting the public's darkest levels of voyeurism. Tracey Emin might not be the kind of artist your granny would like. Her autobiographical style of work is all about exposing the kind of things about herself that most people would be too ashamed to reveal.Her confessional subjects include abortions, rape, self-neglect and promiscuity, sometimes expressed with the help of gloriously old-fashioned looking, hand-sewn applique letters. Her dad quite likes the sewing, because it reminds him of his own mum.Some see poetry in the titles of her work. They include: You Forgot to Kiss My Soul; Every Part of Me Is Bleeding; My Cunt is Wet With Fear; and I Need Art Like I Need God. But her honesty can be disarming. She once told Observer interviewer Lynn Barber that the first thing she did when she started making money was to buy medical insurance, because: "I'm sickly and I get run down and I have very bad herpes, and I like knowing that the doctor's there." Two years later, "Mad Tracey from Margate" (her words) was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for an installation entitled My Bed, a testimony to her self-neglect and over-indulgence. She didn't win, but Charles Saatchi paid £150,000 for it.

Young British Artists or YBAs  also Brit artists and Britart  a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

 

Tracy Emin Got All Painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

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Self defence tips for escaping an attacker's strangulation hold.

How long can you survive with out life giving oxygen to sustain you? It’s a well-known fact that permanent brain damage except in special cases begins to occur after five minutes of depravation. One or two breaths of a nitrogen rich atmosphere are enough to cause a loss of consciousness in a normal human being. How long could you hold your breath if someone were attempting to choke the life from you? Here’s a clue. Not long enough.

So what do you do? That depends on several things the first of which is how the attacker is attempting to throttle you. Is he standing in front of you with his hands on your throat, or is he standing behind you at arm length with his hands squeezing the life from you? Is he behind you with his forearm across your trachea, or is he sitting on your chest leaning over you allowing his weight to do the work?

As you can see there is more than one way for this scum to deprive you of oxygen and your life and the answer can be different for each. However they all have one thing in common - you don’t have much time to free yourself and run to safety. If you have to think about how to react to a given situation then chances are you’re already too late. From the time you are grabbed the clock has started to tick. If you don’t know how to react and flutter around like a bird in the grip of a python then you can expect the same outcome. How ever there is hope in these situations. If you don’t panic, if you know a few rules, and you practice escape techniques religiously, then your chances of breaking loose and running away increase dramatically.

The first rule of self-defense is the only wrong move in self-defense is no move at all. Don’t freeze up when you see someone reaching for you - react. Once he has a hold of you then you have to break their hold to get away. Since the choke hold is almost always used by a larger and stronger opponent against a smaller weaker one if you allow him to grab you, then it's twice the work that you must do. Depending on the size and strength of your attacker, whether he has a hold on you or not can mean the difference between life and death.

No technique will work 100% of the time so practice more than one. If the first fails flow into the second, third...

Don’t be a single shooter. Don’t throw just one punch or kick, throw a multitude of techniques at this scumbag. Don’t allow him the time to gather his wits.

Once you start your counter-attack don’t stop until your opponent ‘s down and can’t catch you. If you stop and give the attacker time to catch his breath then the chances are you’ve just thrown whatever small advantage your training and practice gave you away. Once the element of surprise is gone then a savvy street fighter will fight you differently or pull out a weapon and end the fight permanently. You can’t do much against a pistol twenty feet away.

Once the opponent is down don’t stick around to admire your handy work. Run like hell and attract as much attention as possible. Don’t wait around to see if he’s got a gun, or back up - either one is bad news. If you think that you’ve really hurt him and you're moved by compassion to help this wounded human being, then once you are safe call for an ambulance and write him a note. Take care of yourself first.

For most people this rule is the hardest but the one that holds the most true. The dead feel no pain. You're going to get hurt so ignore the pain. If he's trying to choke you down he's trying to kill you. If you lose, you’re dead anyway so the pain doesn’t matter - you can’t afford to lose because of a sprain, or even a broken bone.

In a bad situation worry about aids later .Use any technique that you can think of to survive. This includes biting, using a bottle, or knife, kicking, screaming, or clawing. You get the idea.

Keep it simple. The high flash kicks are pretty on the big screen but do you want to bet your life on the fact that you won’t slip? Were not in a dojo and were not trying to take a Samari off of his horse. Remember K.I.S.S. Keep it simple stupid.

Double handed chokehold from the front

The attacker is standing in front of you. Both hands are firmly fastened around your throat. Their feet are spread and their fingers are biting deeply and painfully into your throat cutting off the flow of oxygen to your brain. At this point you only have seconds to react or die. Let’s step back and examine this scenario. This type of attack typically happens when one opponent is much larger and stronger than the other is. The attacker wants to see the fear in their victim’s eyes and know that they’re dominating the victim. This attack shows a certain amount of contempt for the victim. This is probably why this type of attack takes place so much in domestic violence situations.

This is the easiest chokehold to escape from and to deliver retaliatory strikes to the attacker. Everything’s open. For starters the attackers going to pull you in close to their body to better control you. When they do that they’ve just negated their advantage of longer reach. If you can touch them you can hurt them.

There’s one thing you need to know from the start about this attack. You can breath. You just need to know how. Look at the human hand. It’s got four fingers and one opposable thumb. When attempting to choke you from the front the attackers trying to press their thumb against your trachea to stop the flow of oxygen. In order to get breath back into the body were going to use their own physiology against them. Were going to turn our throats into the web of their hand so that we no longer have the thumb pressing against out windpipe while we begin out counter attack. Then we’ll duck our chins and tighten the muscles in our necks. It should appear as if you have a very deep frown or a grimace on your face

Your opponent and you are standing toe to toe. We're going to begin our move with our feet. We are about to step back into what’s called a square horse stance.

The way that this is accomplished is you:

Take your left foot and place it twice the width of your shoulders behind the right foot (If you can’t get the full double width get as much as you can; on the street you're not going to be able get classroom conditions).

Bend your knees deeply. In this stance it should look as if you are seated on the back of a horse.

Twist your body to the left while raising your right arm in an arc and bringing the arm up and over your assailant’s wrist (this should tuck their arms under your armpit leaving the face open for a counter strike).

Twist your body to the left -this pulls your assailant off balance and helps to center your own balance.

Deliver a back fist to the assailants chin.

Continue to turn until your back is facing the opponent and then bring the right foot up until the knee is almost touching your chest.

Turn your head until you can see your assailant.

Bring your right foot back and kick your assailant just below their belly but above the groin (this band of muscle can be tightened and toned but not built up like the chest or arms of a weight lifter).

Now retract the leg twice as fast as you put it out.

Run for your life screaming and yelling at the top of your lungs until you reach safety.

When delivering a kick or a punch you should always focus beyond your target in order to get the full power out of the technique. Also pull the arm or kick back in twice as fast as you put it out. You don’t want to give your opponent anything to hang on to.

The whole technique should take about one second to perform. Without practice, in a high stress situation, the chances of your being able to pull this off are one in a thousand. The more you practice the better your chances.

Choke Hold From Behind

This hold is a little harder to break than the first but the eight rules still apply. Let’s examine the situation. The assailant comes at you from behind and places an arm bar across your throat and begins to throttle you. Your reactions going to be:

Step to the left a half step by bringing your right foot to your left.

Now place the left foot one shoulder width to the left.

Reach your right hand forward as if to grasp the air in front of you.

Bring your right elbow back into the sole plexus area as if you were trying to hit the assailant’s backbone.

Most people that have no training punch at a target whereas people that have trained punch through the target. You're a lot less likely to pull your punch by accident and you get more power.

From here bring your fist down in an arc and hit the assailant in the testicles with the bottom of your balled up fist.

Deliver a backfist to the chin. The back fist is delivered by striking with the back two knuckles of the index and middle finger of the balled up fist.

Place your right foot behind their left foot bend over and grasp the opponents left knee and stand up lifting the knee as high as possible.

Deliver a quick and hard elbow strike to the chest area of the aggressor.

When they hit the deck run for your life.

Choke hold from the mounted position

You're laying flat on your back and you have an adversary sitting on your chest with their hands around your throat squeezing with all of their might and leaning all of their weight forward with their elbows locked trying to snuff out your existence.

With this type of attack were going to have to use our whole body to dislodge and escape from your attacker. If done properly once your counter attack is finished you could end up on top of your attacker in the mounted position. You will be in a perfect position to deliver several devastating blows thereby setting up your escape. Make no mistake about this. Even though you will be on top of the attacker the whole purpose of these techniques is escape. Don’t waste your time fighting this guy for as history teaches us the tides of battle can change at a moment’s whim.

You’re on the ground and your arms are free. There’s a person of about twice your weight sitting on your chest choking the life from you. Instead of thrashing about and burning up what little air you have left do the following.

Draw your legs in and place your feet as far under your buttock as possible.

Reach up and grab the assailant’s shirt at around shoulder level with your right hand.

With the right foot push off to the side and throw your hip as far to the left as you can while simultaneously pulling on the right handed sleeve of your assailant’s shirt. (You’re not trying to roll to the left your just squirming your hip to the left.)

As the assailant is pulled to the right you have a choice. You can roll with them and assume a mounted position on your assailant where you can deliver a couple of rapid blows to the trachea or a rake to the eyes; and then roll forward or to the side in order to make good your escape. Or you can attempt to get up and run away before your assailant recovers and attacks you again. This time they could possibly use a weapon.

In order for any of these techniques to do you any good you must practice them time and time again against as many different opponents as possible. Without constant practice you setting yourself up for failure, humiliation, injury, and possibly death.