BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Lauren LeVernier, Desert Island Discs is taking its usual Easter break for the next few

weeks, so to keep you going until we're back on air, we'll be showcasing a few programs

from our back catalogue. As usual, as this is a podcast, the music has been shortened

for rights reasons. This week, the cast away is Tracy Menn, who was interviewed by Sue

Lolley in 2006.

Mike Osterway this week is an artist. Her work is sensational. Indeed, one of her most famous

works, a tent called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, was a centerpiece of the famous Royal

Academy exhibition Sensation in 1997. Two years later, she was shortlisted for the

Turner Prize for work which included my bed, an evocation of a period of breakdown, including

stained knickers and used condoms. She attracts critical approval and vitriol, not always

in equal measure, and takes not unreasonably some delight in the controversy that her art

engenders. Much of it is based on her own complicated life. She was raped as an adolescent, became

promiscuous and has attempted suicide. Like it or loathe it, the impact of her work is

impossible to ignore. Cue's form, wherever it's shown around the world, and she has a room

dedicated to it in Tate Britain. My struggle, she says, has been with my art and my own personal

survival, and it's all linked. She is Tracy Menn. So how much has your art, Tracy, which

is so autobiographical, so confessional, saved you from yourself, if you like? It's been

a kind of therapy for you. I think it started off like that. I always say I'm not the best

visual artist in the world, and I really mean that. What I like about my art and what's

kept me going is the fact that it's about communication, and that's where the survival

is. While I'm making my art and I'm communicating, then I'm obviously not alone. And that's

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