From Partygirl to Biennale Queen, The Guardian

She was the enfant terrible of Britart - loud, wild and unpredictable. Not the kind of person chosen to represent Britain at the prestigious Venice Biennale. But that's what will happen next Sunday when Tracey Emin launches her new show in the British Pavilion. So, what was her secret? We discover how the former wild child cleaned up her act to fulfil the dream of her career.

Two years ago at the last Venice Biennale, I remember Tracey saying wistfully that she'd love to represent Britain, and I said, oh yes, wouldn't that be great - never imagining for a minute that it would happen. I thought she was considered too 'dangerous' by the art establishment - too loud, too drunk, too self-publicising. But of course I should have known that when Tracey sets her mind on something she generally achieves it. She took care in the intervening period to clean up her act, and to woo the sort of people the British Council (which organises the Biennale) listens to. So there have been fewer party pictures in Heat, Hello!, Tatler, but instead a weekly column in the Independent, and well-judged appearances on Wogan and Desert Island Discs. (I remember the latter as the moment when a lot of my friends stopped saying, Why on earth do you like Tracey Emin?, and started saying, Can we meet her?) She was very happy when the British Council took an exhibition of her and David Hockney's drawings to Chile, which was a hit in Santiago. And then she found that one of her fellow judges on the John Moores prize in Liverpool would be Andrea Rose, head of visual arts at the British Council and commissioner of the British Pavilion. Tracey had barely met her before and was quite scared of Rose's 'formidable' reputation, but they hit it off. Rose told me afterwards that she was very impressed by Tracey's commitment to the judging and her brilliant eye for hanging. Even so, Tracey was far from a shoo-in and she was getting very nervous by last summer when the British Council normally announces its choice for the Biennale.
And then there was the Hideous Incident of the Serpentine Loo. Tracey was having a good time at the Serpentine Gallery summer party - a good time unlikely to be synonymous with drinking tea - and then urgently needed the loo. She found a long queue in the Ladies and two women locked in a cubicle together, evidently with no intention of moving, so she banged on the door and shouted at them to come out. The next day she went off to Istanbul where she got a message to present herself to the police for questioning on her return or she would be arrested at the airport! Apparently one of the women in the loo had made a complaint that Tracey pulled her hair (Tracey denies this, and there were plenty of witnesses) and wanted to press charges for assault. Tracey was poleaxed - 'I was terrified, I was devastated, I was shaking'. She thought the British Council would drop her like a stone if they saw her as Not to be Trusted in Toilets. For once in her life she managed to stay shtum until she had gone through the police questioning and been told no charges would be brought, but it was a panicky week.

The British Council normally announces its choice for the Biennale in June or July but this time the announcement was delayed till August, which suggests there was a lot of backstage wrangling. Tracey says she knows that she was not a unanimous choice but she doesn't care. 'I knew that I was a contender because I was the right age and a woman. And they needed a woman because there are so many good female artists in Britain and they've only ever had two [Rachel Whiteread in 1997, and Bridget Riley in 1968]. But I didn't think I'd get it because I never get anything really. I thought Gillian Wearing would get it. In fact I dreamt that she told me she'd got Venice and I said, wow, that's fantastic, and then she patted her stomach and said, seven months. So then when I got Venice I thought, ohmigod, maybe I'm pregnant! I wasn't. But every time you have sex you count the months - you can be four months pregnant for Venice but not eight months. You have to be really fit to do Venice. Anyway, the thing is I was up for it, whereas some artists aren't - they're having a baby or moving house or maybe they just don't want to rise to the challenge of it. Maybe they think, actually I'm quite happy as I am - I don't want to be thrown into that arena. It is an arena. But with me I was going, Yes, yes, I want it, I want it! You don't get offered it twice. It's your time, it's your moment, it makes sense that I'm doing it now, whereas it might not make sense when I'm 50.'

Tracey was told she'd been chosen two days before the official announcement which, for the first time ever, was on radio and television news. Then she and Andrea Rose went off on a recce to Venice. The object was for Tracey to familiarise herself with the British pavilion, and she immediately said she wanted it completely renovated, stripped back to the original, cleaned and painted, which the British Council (with help from English Heritage) has now done. But of course for Tracey the recce was also about choosing her hotel. Andrea Rose told me it was the first time in her long experience as Biennale Commissioner that she has ever had to go round inspecting five-star hotels and working out the thread-count on bedlinen. The British Council normally puts its artists in a quiet old-established hotel but Tracey wanted to stay in maximum luxury on the Lido, with her own boat, a room for her assistant and an office. 'They always want to put you in some bijou hotel with inglenooks,' says Tracey, 'where they tell you you'll love the landlady, she's such a character. But I've come here to work and this is where I'd stay if I was coming to Venice by myself, so why should I stay somewhere else?' Quite - but even with contributions from the British Council and her various galleries, the whole Biennale is costing her a fortune. But she says: 'It's worth it because it's the experience of a lifetime, innit?' And anyway doing the Biennale puts up prices on her work, and there has already been a great rush from all round the world to buy Emins.

So - recce done, hotel chosen, party date and venue fixed - Tracey then spent quite a leisurely autumn and winter, holidaying in Africa, setting up a new studio and office and organising her archive, without, so far as I could see, producing any work. She bumped into Gilbert and George, who live in the same street (and refer to her as Superslag, in the nicest possible way) and they told her not to worry: four months was the right time to spend preparing for the Biennale. Any longer and she'd get stale, any shorter and she wouldn't finish in time. Andrea Rose was less sanguine and kept urging her to start.

I went round to Tracey's new studio in early April, hoping to see some of her work for Venice. I loved her draughty old studio with its long sewing tables and bales of fabric and big tomato plants on the fire escape. Her new studio looks more like an ad agency office, all computers and filing cabinets in a yuppified work/space development with a Japanese pebble garden. But she is very proud of its efficiency and spends ages showing me the walls of shelving with all her archive in neat boxfiles. But where is the work? There are half a dozen very small drawings, just back from the framers, but nothing else that I can see.

Jay Jopling (her gallerist) came round the other day, she tells me, asking to see what she was doing for Venice, so she told him: 'I'm converting the whole pavilion into a swimming pool - there aren't enough swimming pools in Venice. I got Richard Rogers to design it and he's just signed off the plans. It's costing £150,000 for the concrete alone, but I'm getting Speedo to sponsor it and they're paying a million. Everyone will be given towels saying "Tracey by Speedo". I'm going to have to warn everyone to bring a costume.'

She went on describing this pool for half an hour, without drawing breath. I thought, my god, she's really lost it. Finally she let me get a word in edgeways and I asked: 'But will be there anything in the pavilion apart from the pool?' And she cackled: 'Fooled you! Just like Jay.' Well I'm glad it was a joke, but I still had no idea what work she was doing.

I had to leave to meet friends for lunch in Brick Lane, and she said she'd walk me round there. But she took me by a circuitous route and suddenly stopped outside a blank metal door and keyed some numbers into the lock. The shutter rolled up and we were in an echoing hangar full of Tracey paintings - very big, very pale and mostly unfinished. She said she was happy with two of them but not the others. She was hoping to do a dozen. But the great thing she had realised, she said, was that she didn't need to do all new work for Venice. Gilbert and George did, but most artists mix old with new, so she was putting out requests to collectors to borrow stuff for the Biennale. But she would not show any blankets (actually, there is one in her show, but an old one) because she thinks they're becoming a bit of a cliche. 'When you've worked something out so well it becomes a formula and you've got all these pound signs in your head and a queue of collectors waiting. I thought, no, I don't want to do that! So I told Jay I'm not making any blankets for the foreseeable future, maybe five or six years, till I've forgotten how to do it and it all goes rough and starts over again.'

I went out to see her in Venice last weekend and found her much more relaxed than she'd been for months. She had been going a bit mad and was ill in bed for a week after the work had been shipped to Venice. She told me: 'This bit I'm really enjoying - the last few months I hated. I've done a lot of work and that's why I've been really stressed out and a complete cunt, really boring and up my own arse.' But in the end she finished well before the deadline - 'I always do.' Moreover, far from having too little work she now has stuff left over that Jay Jopling will take on to sell at the Basel Art Fair.

The pavilion has been completely renovated as she instructed and looks beautiful. The installation is finished except that she is just waiting for a few trusted advisers - Jay Jopling, Lorcan O'Neill her Italian gallerist, Matt Collishaw, her old boyfriend, and Julian Schnabel, her American artist friend - to inspect it before signing it off.

But she's been wearing the same clothes (a hideous shiny mumu and flip flops) for the past three days because BA lost all her luggage, and 'There's just so many times you can turn your pants inside out, Lynn.' Worse still, her computers were in her luggage, so although she'd hired an extra room as an office for her assistant, Alex, they had no office equipment apart from Alex's Blackberry. BA hasn't even apologised. Luckily she didn't bring all her clothes for the opening week parties because she was going home for a last weekend visit to see Docket her cat. But she is still furious with BA and has splashed out on a private jet for her return to Venice next week.

Has she acquired lots of fabulous new clothes? No, she says - now she is a size 14, designers do not bombard her with free frocks the way they used to a decade ago. She will probably wear her black silk Vivienne Westwood ballgown for the opening party 'because it makes me look really thin and glamorous and I feel very comfortable in it.' She says 70 friends are coming out for the party, everyone from Jerry Hall to Sandra Esquilant, her pub landlady, but Ronnie Wood can't make it because he is starting a Stones tour and George Michael is playing Wembley. Elton John is coming earlier in the week for a lunch with Sam Taylor-Wood (who, bizarrely, is showing in the Ukrainian pavilion) but he has to leave before Tracey's party. Nor are any of her family coming - she knew she wouldn't have time to look after them properly so she thought it better to bring them to Venice later, maybe in September.

Over breakfast at her gorgeous hotel on the Lido, and then by the pool, and then on the terrace, she talks and talks, not just about the Biennale but about her life generally: 'I'm having a midlife crisis actually, and I'm just so confused at the moment about what I want for the rest of my life. Some people think if only they could have success with their career, everything would be all right, but it's not. When Isabella Blow died I thought, fucking hell, life is short. It was like a wake-up call. And I realised that I'm 43, I'm probably never going to have children - I would rather have my career than children - which puts me into a very different world to other women, and I intend to live in that world. Even though sex with Scott [her photographer boyfriend] is fantastic, I don't need it. Relationships are great but I don't know how good I am at them. I realised that being an artist is actually quite difficult and I am difficult, and I want to enjoy that difficulty and not feel threatened by it.'

She is unsure what to do after the Biennale. This week will be hectic - non-stop interviews, lunches, dinners, parties - and then the art circus moves on to Basel. She will remain in Venice for a couple of days to see all the other shows, then she returns to England for a stint in Margate with her mother, and a visit to Canterbury Cathedral to collect an honorary D. Lit from Kent University. After that, she says vaguely, she hopes to build herself a swimming pool (in Spitalfields? surely not) or maybe even move to the country, though it turns out her idea of the country is 'up near you, Lynn', which is Highgate. Beyond that, she wants to do some 'giving back' - she already does a lot of work for the NSPCC but now she wants to 'get into Africa' and build a library in Uganda. But she thinks there's a problem with preserving books there - do they get eaten by insects? Huh? After a long discussion about the book-eating habits of weevils, it suddenly occurs to me to wonder aloud - is she hoping to be made a Dame? Well, of course that would be very nice, she says demurely, but she has no idea how you go about it. More NSPCC, less Uganda, I tell her, and she gives me a reproachful look.

After she has talked about herself non-stop for three hours I tell her that my tape has run out but not to worry because I've got plenty of material for this piece. What I am trying to say tactfully is: couldn't we talk about something else now? But it is no good. We are awaiting the arrival of Julian Schnabel, the American artist and film director, who is flying into Venice by private jet en route from Rome to Cannes to advise Tracey on her installation. He is coming by launch from the airstrip to collect Tracey and take her across the lagoon to see her pavilion in the Giardini. He phones every five minutes to say he is on his way. We go down to the hotel watergate to watch him arrive - a marvellous tawny-bearded Viking in fraying purple silk pyjamas and red socks. Blow me, no sooner have we clambered into the launch than he starts talking about himself non-stop all the way across the lagoon - how he is building himself a Venetian palazzo on his roof in New York, how he has just been to Rome for an exhibition and is now going to Cannes where he hopes to win the best director prize (he does) for his film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 'Have you seen the reviews?' he asks me. Give me your email address and I'll send them. He is worse than Tracey! And she for once is completely silenced by an ego even greater than her own. Unfortunately he is happily married otherwise he would be perfect for Trace - a lovely great bear of a man.

Tracey takes him to see the pavilion but journalists are banned from the building until press day, so Andrea Rose and I meet, like spies, on a park bench. She says she is delighted with the installation but now a bit worried that Schnabel will start changing it round (and sure enough her assistant soon rings from the pavilion to say he is doing just that). But she is thrilled with the restoration of the Pavilion, which now looks more beautiful than she has ever seen it. Of all the artists she has worked with at the Biennale (and she has been commissioner since 1995) none has been as responsive to the building as Tracey. She stripped it of all its excrescences - fake cornices and lighting tracks - and even found the original colour of the loggia pillars. 'She has a fantastic spatial sense,' says Andrea, 'and is incredibly sensitive to touch and feel.' Which is why, she now realises, they had to inspect all those hotels at the beginning. 'I've never had to do that before for an artist, and of course I resented it, but that is part of Tracey. She was stroking the sheets and doing a thread count - but then you think about My Bed and her sewing and her sort of feminine work ethic and it all makes sense.'

When did she start thinking of Tracey as a Biennale possible? 'Late, I would say. There was no very obvious candidate. But I saw a little painting of hers in the RA summer show last year. When I saw it was Tracey I thought, that girl's really got something!' Andrea hoped Tracey would do some paintings for the Biennale, and Tracey was excited by the idea and rented the lock-up studio I saw and bought lots of canvases. 'But they just didn't seem to be coming. She started about six, two of which were good, but then she didn't push it - painting needs real concentration. And I was a bit perturbed that Schnabel said to her at one point, well, Tracey if you're not enjoying it, it's not you. I don't know if that's what he really said but it's what she said he said.'

Was there a moment when Andrea worried Tracey wouldn't produce enough work? 'Yes! The last three months! But I've been proved wrong - we've now got too much work and we're going to have to edit some out.'

So what is Tracey showing, if it's not paintings, not blankets, not big sculptures? All I could glean is that there is a big neon poem, several embroidered sheets, lots of watercolours and possibly some small sculptures. But we shall have to wait and see. The show is called Borrowed Light, which doesn't give much away. Tracey says: 'It's the most feminine work I've ever made.' Andrea says something similar: 'It's remarkably ladylike. There is no ladette work - no toilet with a poo in it - and actually it is very mature I think, quite lovely. She is much more interested in formal values than people might expect, and it shows in this exhibition. It's been revelatory working with her. Tracey's reputation for doing shows and hanging them is not good, but she's been a dream to work with. What it shows is that she's moved a long way away from the YBAs. She's quite a lady actually!'