In 1992 artists Sarah Lucas (b. 1962) and Tracey Emin (b. 1963), who had recently graduated from Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Arts, decided to set up ‘The Shop’ at 103 Bethnal Green Road, in Shoreditch, East London. The Shop was to be an alternative to the traditional artist’s studio – Sarah Lucas had just left a studio she was sharing with Gary Hume, and Tracey Emin wasn’t making art but preferred writing at the time. They wanted something that felt like a ‘shop shop’, as they recalled in an interview.
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The Shoreditch shop was meant to be a place where people could drop by at any point, a social space that could work as a creative haven for the two artists. At the time, Lucas had some funding from Charles Saatchi, but Emin had nothing for herself. And despite both being part of the promising Young British Artists group, their male counterparts were grabbing most of the art world’s attention, leaving the two to fend for themselves. In an interview for Frieze, Sadie Coles, now a famous contemporary art gallerist, described the move as radical and inspiring: to her, the shop “felt like the two artists were determining their position within an art scene”.
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At the time, East London was still ungentrified. And The Shop came about at a time in which London was transitioning from a quite traditional art scene to what is today known as one of the commercial capitals of the art world. As Lucas explained in a later interview with the Guardian, "[The Shop] was a part of the Shoreditch revolution, of east London becoming somewhere to hang out."
The pair made all kinds of creations, from works of art to merchandise, from mugs with their faces on them to one of their best sellers: an ashtray with Damien Hirst's face on it. "Damien Hirst came in and saw our ashtrays that had his face in them – you put your cigarette out on him. They weren't nasty, though: he was making work about cigarettes then, so it was a homage," remembered Emin. "The way we priced everything was totally arbitrary, too. It started at 50p and went up to £500 for Sarah's proper work. God knows how much it would all be worth today."
The two would buy cheap materials from Brick Lane and customize them. Tracey Emin would chain smoke a pack of cigarettes and make collage cutouts of them, and sell them back for the price of a pack of cigarettes. Sarah Lucas would stuff black tights with newspapers and call it an octopus. Lucas later recalled how Tracey Emin had always been business-oriented, and how she’d make t-shirts (their biggest hit a t-shirt with the slogan ‘She’s Kebab’) and up their price each time one was sold. At the height of The Shop, a t-shirt could cost you £125, though people could also walk out with a piece of art if they picked up one of the many outstanding bills the artists couldn’t afford to pay.
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The Shop was a hit. In Brick Lane, the market licenses could allow you to stay open 24 hours. When Emin and Lucas found out, they decided to stay open all night. And their neighbors loved them, as did collectors and gallerists. One time, one of the market’s organizers commissioned them with t-shirts to advertise the opening times of Brick Lane Market. An art dealer bought them all up. The shop became an anarchic endless party. People found out about it through word of mouth. “We'd have massive art collectors get off the plane from New York and come in at 11pm on a Saturday night," said Emin in 2013.
And it went out with a bang. After six months of relentless hard graft, the pair had their final night on Tracey Emin’s 30th birthday, on July 3, 1993. The theme was ‘Fucking Fantastic and Just About Old Enough to Do Whatever She Wants’ – although no one knew whose birthday it was. “We wanted to go out like rock stars, so we left the door open all night, the idea being that everything would get trashed or stolen”, Emin explained.
The Shop closed down, but the pair went on to achieve great international acclaim. Sarah Lucas was already quite famous in 1993, having been included in the famous 1988 group exhibition Freeze along with contemporary artists Damien Hirst and Gary Hume. Three years after The Shop, Lucas was the protagonist of a BBC documentary, and in 1998 she produced a series of self-portraits that would become one of her most-known works. She has since been featured in exhibitions across the world, including the Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Venice Biennale.
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Tracey Emin was less known at the time but received her first solo show at White Cube a couple of months after the closing of The Shop. In 1997 she gathered a great amount of media attention with her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of people the artists had shared a bed with, which was featured at one of Charles Saatchi's exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London. Since then, Emin has become one of the most famous contemporary artists of our time.
