So eminently Emin

Tracey Emin: Menphis

Tracey Emin continues, as ever, to plunder her past, or at least an interesting versions of it. Her latest show Memphis misspelt in typical Emin fashion to become Menphis, alludes to the historicism: the latter is the ancient Egyptian capital, not the Tennessee city, as the press release helpfully points out.

Like the ancient realm, Emin can't have that many treasures from her own ruinous past left to plunder, though you imagine she's probably impressed by the witty historical reference.

Nonetheless, she has still managed to cover the walls with screeds of handwritten A4 sheets relating numerous personal remembrances and vignettes. Each tale is accompanied by a selection of small, personal objects.

In one, she recounts a dull and lonely school holiday in which, each day, she buys a small china figurine for her mother. This goes on for some time, innocently unaware that the accumulating clutter of tiny creatures is driving her mother to distraction. Beside this, a forlorn menagerie fills a little glass cabinet.

In another, she writes tenderly of giving her dead grandmother a manicure and tweezers session as she lies in a funeral parlour, and then getting accidentally locked in. As if to lend credence to the strange tale, the beauty aids are forensically displayed.

Emin has always been an engaging storyteller, and each tale ends with a funny, skewed or rather sad aside. It's all sweetly, whimsically sentimental, and all well-trodden Emin territory.