Tracey Emin created Laying With The Olive Trees in 2011 as one of two unique lithographs to accompany her major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, "Love is What You Want", in the same year.

Known for her deeply personal and emotive style, Emin uses her own body as a central figure in this work; continuing her exploration of the themes of love, memory and longing. The piece is visually very similar to her watercolours and large-scale paintings from the same period.

In Laying With The Olive Trees, the female figure lies still at the centre of the composition surrounded by repeated motifs of flourishing olive trees, which is taken as a nod to her Turkish-Cypriot heritage. Emin has described the landscape of her father’s birth country as a “dream-like place - a cross between a desert and an ocean”. Thus the use of Olive Trees could symbolise both abundance and lack; speaking to the fullness and then the remnants of love, the tree also being a symbol of memory and rootedness.

An incredible example of Emin’s work, with its quick and lyrical sketchwork it captures with immediacy the emotional state.