When Tracey was Traci: Emin's unseen early paintings published for the first time

Before Tracey Emin, there was Traci Emin. That was how the young woman who would go on to be a star of conceptual art signed her name on a stark black-andwhite woodcut poster back in 1986. It was for her degree show at Maidstone College of Art, where she earned a first in printmaking. It caught my eye a year ago while I was exploring her studio archive.

The woodcut – showing two desperate lovers clinging together in a dark night of the soul, the woman with an anchor tattoo – is part of a previously unseen hoard of Emin’s all but forgotten early work that reveals a different side of the artist from the one most people think they know. Much of it is lost and exists only as slides, the originals having been destroyed, she thinks, by a former boyfriend. They show the sincere and skilled artist Emin was before she became a household name and an infamous figure to many. When I saw these student works, I wanted to get them published so that everyone else could encounter that intense young soul. I was thrilled when she let me include them in a new visual book about her art.

In the 90s, Emin became the eloquently drunk spokeswoman for a generation that seemed to despise craft and revere Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the readymade artwork. Her display of her chaotic bed at the 1999 Turner prize – littered with used condoms, fag butts, joints and booze bottles – is for many people the most in-your-face readymade in recent memory.

But Emin had a secret: she wasn’t really a follower of Duchamp at all. Nowadays, she sees him as a bad pain