Tracey Emin: The Tracey show

Her work is reviled and admired in equal measure, and her life excites interest like that of no other artist. In a candid interview, Tracey Emin tells John Walsh why she turned down Celebrity Big Brother, why she identifies with Rembrandt and Jackson Pollock, and why she thinks the Turner prize is unfair

Tracey Emin regarded me sternly, with eyes as dark as coffee beans. "The thing is," she said, "I am not a celebrity. Even if they did ring up and ask me to go on Celebrity Big Brother..."

My God, I said. They did? What did you say?

"I told them I was an artist and that it's not how I make my living, going on game shows. They were quite rude, actually. They couldn't believe that I didn't want to be on it."

But surely, I said, in the stilly watches of the night, did you regret not going on it? You could have had some lively conversations with Les Dennis...

"No," said Ms Emin, firmly. "Being somewhere for two weeks without any books or newspapers or TV or pens and paper, it would drive me mad, right?"

But don't you sometimes feel part of the celebrity culture?

"No," she said. "I don't have anything to do with all that. OK, apart from appearing on Have I Got News For You. And the Jonathan Ross show."

Weren't you supposed to go on Graham Norton's show as well?

"I like Graham," said Tracey, in a considered way. "I said I'd do it in the summer, provided they didn't take the piss out of what I do. Graham said, 'Ooooh, no, we just want you to be happy'. So I went on holiday, and when I came back, I was due to do the show the next day. This researcher rang up to ask some questions – where do I live, do I go to art galleries, stuff like that, and then said, 'Can you give me some of the names of the people on your tent?'. [That is, the famous exhibit Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, in which several real people's names were sewn on to the canvas of a tent.]

"I said, 'You must be fucking joking. This is exactly what I said I didn't want. If you're planning to get the audience to do a really stupid art thing and get me to judge it, or if you're going to get someone in the audience who's got the same name as someone on the tent and ask if I'd slept with this person – just forget it. And I'm not having Betty [Graham Norton's elderly stooge] laying on a rumpled bed, surrounded by empty vodka bottles, either'.

"An hour later, Graham's assistant rang up and said, 'You're not coming on the show'. They got Jade from Big Brother to do it instead – and it was a spoof about 'Tat Modern'. They'd done exactly what I was afraid they'd do. I was spot-on."

She bridles at the memory of her close brush with mockery. As she rightly says, they invite film directors on to chat shows without insulting their films. "If they have Joan Collins on, they don't say, 'You've been in some shit movies haven't you?'."

You have to admit that Ms Emin has a point. But such is her ubiquity, and so ambiguous is her fame, it sometimes feels as if the world is queueing up to meet her, hear her views, report her latest excesses, and slag her off behind her back. Her name now appears, in one newspaper or another – in the arts reviews, the gossip columns, the news pages, the cartoons – every single day. Tracey gives a talk at the Oxford Union. Tracey's new art show (at Oxford's Modern Art gallery) gets a review in The Daily Telegraph, whose art critic grudgingly admits that he's "reluctant to write her off" because, dammit, some of her new stuff makes him "pause and think".

Then she appears at No 41 in ArtReview magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People in the contemporary-art world (ahead of both David Hockney and Damien Hirst). Next day, she's in the Daily Mirror's Scurra diary, for having told some students that her cat, Docket, "inadvertently took some cocaine at the weekend". Next day, a collection of highfalutin essays on her art is reviewed in The Independent. The day after, she's at Tate Britain revealing what she's done with the Christmas tree they gave her as the gallery's guest Christmas-tree designer. (It's an annual honour. One year, the tree was planted upside down. Another year, it was plonked in a skip. This year, to the chagrin of the Tate bosses, Tracey has given it away to the Lighthouse charity, leaving only a plinth and a robin behind.) There's even a school-playground joke that the children bring home: "What would happen if Tracey Emin went to Detroit and married a famous white rapper? She'd be Tracey Emineminem."

In the midst of this dust-storm of fame and stardom, Ms Emin cuts a surprisingly sensible and un-starry figure. She moves around her home turf of Spitalfields, east London, her slender frame snugly encased in a huge warm coat, elephantine grey mohair trousers, a knitted waistcoat and a pink woolly scarf, as if trekking through Antarctica. Her warm, dimly lit Georgian house (across the road from Gilbert and George's) is bizarrely stuffed with dark, wooden antique furniture, with enough tables, chairs, chests of drawers, chaises longues and rockers to furnish a fair-sized hotel. Ms Emin is by no means a groovy modern chick. At 39, she lives a quiet life with her boyfriend, Mat Collishaw, her cat Docket, and her embroidery – a skill that she's kept from childhood ("though I've forgotten a lot of the stitches"). Her most passionate immediate requirement is not drink, drugs or sex, but another Georgian cabinet.

As we nose around her favourite antiques shop in Spitalfields Market, it occurs to me that she has a remarkable skill for spotting, in "found objects", things that will look poignant, or vulnerable, or similarly expressive in a gallery context. It was a transforming moment when she looked at the bed on which she had sweated out several days of post-bust-up, alcoholic trauma, and realised that its trashed linen, its soiled knickers, crushed fags, dead soldiers and crumpled paper all spelt out a message of despair. Likewise, the decrepit Margate bathing-hut she exhibited in London, the helter-skelter that loomed over the White Cube gallery, and the derelict jetty with its collapsing shed that's the pièce de résistance of the new exhibition.

She's terrific at finding eloquence in constructed things. One of her new pieces is a triptych – a bed surrounded by a "gin bath" on the left and an empty clothes basket, or cradle, on the right. The combined symbol-cluster of conception, abortion and birth is very effective, if a little obvious. How did she become so adept at spotting resonant antiques? "Maybe it's just because I've got so much art in my head," she said. "It transforms the things I see". OK, I said, but how do you detect a quality of, say, poignancy in a wooden chest? "It's not really about that," she said. "These things mean a lot to me because they're mine. They belong to me. I don't go around looking in shops for things to go in galleries." But how can you communicate to the gallery-visitor what they mean to you privately? She looked puzzled. "You can't." she said. "Hopefully, it just works. If people don't get it..." She made a face, as if disbelieving that anyone could fail to understand what her stuff is "about".

Ms Emin has always claimed that her art is perfectly simple and direct ("I'm very genuine," she says, "with me, what you see is what you get"), and her most vivid works are effective because of their simplicity – like the dilapidated pier. Talk to her for five minutes and you're struck by how close to the surface of her conversation is the subject of death. One of her exhibits is called Baby Coffins – some wooden drawers with lids. "When me and my twin brother were born," Tracey explained, "the first thing we slept in was drawers like these. I bought them as a chest of drawers, didn't know what to do with them so I made the coffins."

They aren't a throwback to some artisanal coffin-making tradition, however. Ms Emin just invented them. Her antique-shop-owning friend Andrew is now keeping an eye out, on her behalf, for some chairs to go with her 17th-century coffin table. Her what? "It's the only thing in my house that's older than the house. When you sit at the table, you can definitely feel some kind of resonance. It would definitely have had coffins on it." And when she bought an old Victorian hip-bath, to her it wasn't just something her whiskery ancestors would have washed themselves in. "I thought it was fantastic. I've had it for three years. It's really stained and disgusting. It looks like somebody died in there. The stains and the rust – you just think of blood."

Ms Emin's thoughts turn easily to blood and death (and babies, another motif of her conversation – she's decided that, at 39, she is too old to have any), and mention of the Turner prize (whose 2002 winner will be announced on Sunday) turns her thoughts very bloody indeed. Three years ago, she narrowly failed to win it for her celebrated My Bed, and her failure still rankles. "The Turner prize is so unfair," she said. "I used to believe that any of the artists considered for it genuinely had a fair chance of winning. I believed it was done by democratic vote, and that anyone could win. The artists who are nominated believe that, the public believes that, but it's not true.

"The four judges nominate four people who they want to win. Then one judge says, 'I'm not having Jake and Dinos Chapman, over my dead body'. The second one says, 'In that case, you can't have So-and-so', and you end up with a watered-down list of artists, not the artists the judges wanted. It's never the people who deserve to get nominated. It doesn't matter how brilliant their show might be, or what they've done for British art, they're never going to get the prize. If they are on the shortlist, they were put there as a compromise candidate.

"I think that's what happened to me when I was shortlisted, because none of the judges had any association with me. They'd all worked one-to-one with the other artists."

Was she saying that the judging of the prize is corrupt? "No, it's not corrupt. It's just not fair." But wasn't she saying that it's all about who you know? "No, it's not who you know, it's who you've worked with, it's who you've done exhibitions with, it's who knows how your mind works. If one of the judges had been someone who knows what it's like to work with me, they would have defended me. It was very stupid of me to accept the nomination, because there was no chance I was going to win, because none of them really knew me."

Why did she need to win so badly? Wasn't it enough to have been confirmed as one of the best, or most interesting, four artists in the country? There was a long silence. "It would have made my Mum and Dad really happy. If you've been constantly slagged off all the time, and then you suddenly win something like that, it says: 'Look – I do what I want to do, on my own terms and I can still be a winner.' But in our society, you can't do that, you're not allowed. It would have been a great triumph not just for me, but for people like me who have to exist on the outside, who don't toe the line with any of the systems or authorities, to prove you can get ahead of them. But actually, of course, you can't."

There's a lot of confusion in Ms Emin's attack on the prize, a fair amount of paranoia (quite understandable, given the critical mauling her rumpled sheets and confessional knickers received at the time from critics and the press), and a lot of emotional leakage in her words (wanting, for example, someone to defend her on a judging panel, rather than enthuse about her), but you can't doubt the depth of her feelings.

During our otherwise delightful two-hour meeting, we nearly came to blows when I tried to defend a critic who'd been rude about her artistic persona and called it "semi-retarded". Tracey hit the roof. I said it wasn't an attack on her personality but on the figure whose distraught, querulous voice appears in her drawings or stitched on to her blankets. Ms Emin insisted that it was character assassination, and from there we got on to the topic of authenticity.

There's no other artist, I ventured, about whom critics and viewers ask whether the pain she expresses is genuine – as if the reality of her past suffering had a bearing on the quality of her art. They wonder, I said, if you're really as flayed and hurt and abused as you maintain, and if you should still be going on about it, now that you're rich and famous and successful.

Ms Emin turned her liquefying eyes on mine, and answered very slowly: "Look – if you've been sexually abused and raped, and had a fucked-up existence when you were young, and for some stupid reason you kept on having that existence when you were in your late teens and early twenties, and then one day you woke up and thought, 'My God, what have I been doing, how could I have been living like that?' – then, even if you change, even if things appear to get better, you still have the remorse from that time that was wasted and lost. So if I want to make work about that, that's my business. If I want to put it on the walls, that's my business. If I can't justify it, that's my problem. But I can, so it's not."

Soon, we were back on friendly terms, discussing who had been the Tracey Emins of previous art generations. I suggested that Gilbert and George had started the whole the-artist-is-the-artwork business that Tracey now so successfully mines. "Naow," she said, scornfully, "the first was Rembrandt. He used to walk around in these weird outfits, being The Painter. Rembrandt may be dead but if he was sitting here right now, I'm sure he'd admit it." She laughed. "No, hang on, there's another one – Jackson Pollock. The way he did his paintings was pure performance. There's lots of artists in history who've done work that puts them first, and the art second."

Yes, but few of them would have the airy chutzpah to put themselves alongside Rembrandt and Pollock. I left the remarkable, unstoppable Tracey with a curious lightness in my step. Celebrity or not, artist or merely media star, for a woman obsessed with coffins and womb-like furniture, Ms Emin is oddly close to being a Life Force.

Tracey Emin's show, This Is Another Place, is at Modern Art, Oxford, to 19 Jan