In The Mother (2017), Tracey Emin figures motherhood through a kneeling nude absorbed in the act of holding. Inwardly turned and gently hunched, the figure appears to shelter an absent presence cradled in her open palms. Emin renders the body without idealisation, its irregular bronze surface bearing the marks of age and lived experience as limb and hand taper into slender, cord-like extensions that evoke the maternal bond of attachment and severance. Enlarged beyond the scale of the individual body, the faceless figure brings the intimacies of maternity, sexuality, devotion and loss into public view.

Unveiled in 2019 as part of Emin’s exhibition ‘A Fortnight of Tears’ at White Cube Bermondsey, London, The Mother belongs to a significant body of large-scale bronze figures that mark a threshold moment in the artist’s sculptural practice. Made in the wake of her mother’s death, these works arrest in monumental, material terms the acute emotional states that have long animated Emin’s art, translating the improvisatory charge of her drawn and painted line into bronze. Conceived at a scale commensurate with public encounter, Emin’s large-scale bronzes have since been presented across major institutional venues and public sites, including Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2022), Arley Hall & Gardens, Cheshire, UK (2022), and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2025). This edition of The Mother has recently returned from the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, where it presided over the museum’s entrance for several years. In 2022, a nine-metre version of The Mother was unveiled in Oslo at Inger Munch’s Pier outside Munchmuseet, underscoring the work’s capacity to move between private affect and monumental address. In bronze, Emin awards fleeting interior states the weight and exposure of a lasting monument.

The Mother emerged from Emin’s engagement with the traditional lost-wax method of bronze casting, taking its initial form through a period of experimentation in small clay figurines. Collaborating with a foundry in East London, the sculpture was enlarged from its clay model into a full-scale polystyrene form, then coated in plaster and jesmonite, allowing Emin to rework the surface by hand prior to the final cast. What might otherwise have been effaced by the discipline of the foundry process is preserved – the bronze retaining the immediacy of clay, holding the pressure of the artist’s fingers and the quickened decisions of modelling across its surface. Despite its mass, the figure reads as provisional and alive, suggesting a body still in the process of coming into form, and, in so doing, reinforces a meditation on maternity and creative labour as parallels.

One of Emin’s earliest ventures in bronze, Baby Things (2008), saw the artist cast discarded infant belongings and disperse the small patinated objects throughout Folkestone for the town’s 2008 Triennial as though mislaid: a child’s mitten, a blanket, a bootie, their finish imbued with the look of the found. If Baby Things situates tenderness and loss in miniature across the civic field, The Mother extends that same emotional register onto an altogether different scale. As the artist observed, ‘I’ve gone from tiny to giant’ (Tracey Emin, in conversation with Arturo Galansino, in Tracey Emin: Sex and Solitude, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2025, p.30).