Time & Perspective Quote by Tracey Emin

Emin’s “gray area” isn’t an evasion; it’s a claim of artistic jurisdiction. She’s talking about memory the way her work often treats the body: not as evidence, but as terrain. The line rejects the courtroom model of truth (dates, transcripts, clean causality) and replaces it with something messier and more honest to lived experience: the way time edits us, how recollection acquires scratches, jump cuts, and overwritten scenes.

The phrasing matters. “It’s my memory” draws a hard boundary around ownership, a boundary that’s ethical as much as aesthetic. Emin has built a career on confessional material that gets misread as simple autobiography. Here she’s reminding the listener that confession is not the same as documentation. What happened “between that moment… and now” includes shame, self-protection, therapy-speak, cultural narratives, tabloid reduction, the pressure to turn pain into a coherent storyline. “Gray area” becomes a refusal to be pinned to a single, marketable version of herself.

There’s also a quiet critique of how audiences consume artists like Emin: hungry for authenticity, impatient with ambiguity, quick to police consistency. By foregrounding the 10- or 15-year gap, she points to the slow violence of interpretation over time - how other people’s takes can start to colonize your own recollection. The intent is defensive and liberating at once: a permission slip to contradict herself, to revise, to let memory be unreliable without being invalid. That’s not softness; it’s strategy.