This is exactly how I feel right now is a visual testament to Tracey Emin’s continuous exploration of metaphysical notions of love, through which she aims to grasp different forms of intimacy. The artist only started working with bronze in 2010 and has since then expressed her devotion to it. Emin conceives of her bronze sculptures as three-dimensional approaches to drawing, a medium which sits at the core of her artistic practice. Her first introduction to bronze happened shortly after she finished working on a print collaboration with Louise Bourgeois, as Emin recalls: “Jerry Gorovoy, Louise’s assistant, took me to a foundry in New York and encouraged me to start making bronzes. It’s like learning a whole new language, but I love it” (Tracey Emin quoted in Phoebe Hoban, ‘Artist Tracey Emin Explains Why She Married a Rock’, The Cut, 8 June 2016, online).

Emin’s worship of materials reached an unprecedented level when she announced she had exchanged vows with a large rock in the garden of her home in the South of France in 2016, the same year she executed the present work. In this emotionally charged sculpture, the British artist delineates a lone, broken figure, characterised by a highly tactile and rough surface; it can be read as a self-portrait of the artist, as the majority of her works are. She is headless, armless and with one leg, almost as a scorched relic of a person pulled out of a bombed building. Nonetheless, it persists as flesh, as human. Her horizontal positioning, lying on her back, enhances the idea of suffering. She is not the victim of a mass catastrophe, but of everyday disasters of love and loneliness. Her pointed foot suggests an idea of bodily tension and discomfort. Through its title, the work establishes a degree of intimacy with the viewer, initially resisted by the facelessness of the figure. Representing a dismembered figure with a convex stomach, Emin reflects on her own aging body: “...things really changed! And you have to really come to terms with that and understand it. That girl is gone, and she is never coming back. And I think it’s actually more difficult for women who haven’t had children, because you were a girl, and then suddenly you ’re old, and there’s nothing in between” (Ibid.).

Through her bronze sculptures, Emin takes on a typically male art form and approaches it through her feminine touch, with her hands imprinted on every surface, placing great emphasis on the idea of tactility. As recurrent in Emin’s body of work, This is exactly how I feel right now transmits the emotional essence of the artist’s own experience, as she establishes a confessional dialogue with both herself and the external world.