The school where art meets life

Facing her mortality prompted Tracey Emin to create a lasting legacy, helping her to find fulfilment nurturing younger artists

- JONATHAN JONES

It's a Saturday morning and the band of the 1st Margate Boys' and Girls' Brigade is marching down a side street with pipes and drums ringing out amid a crowd that includes luminaries of the art world, Bob Geldof, and the kids across the road who are still in their pyjamas. Then the town's Social Singing Choir launches into a version of Madonna's Like a Prayer that is so lovely people cry. Tracey Emin, too, seems to wipe away a tear as she waits in her tricorn hat and red robe - the official costume of a Freewoman of Margate - to cut the red ribbon and officially open her new art school.

This delightful public performance is an Emin artwork, but not as we know it. Emin's subject matter until now had always been herself. "That woman knows herself," as Lucian Freud said approvingly. But this ceremony is about her embrace of other people. It's about the community she is setting out to create.

Emin announced early last year that she was going to open her own art school in Margate, the Kent seaside town where she's from. Just 15 months later, she is opening the building that houses TEAR (Tracey Emin Artist Residencies), where the first year's intake of 10 young artists from around the world are already settling in. It also provides affordable work spaces for professional artists, called Tracey Emin Studios.

"I think being an artist is quite lonely," she tells me a couple of days ahead of the grand opening, settling into the comfy sofa in the common room of her school. "And I don't have any children. All of these things that other people seem to acquire in life, I don't have.

"And when I thought I might die, I thought: 'Fuck, what have I been doing with my life?' And then I thought: 'Well, if I get through this, I'm going to do something. I'm going to change things.'"