Tracey Emin’s art practice is highly autobiographical or confessional. She often uses her own experience, emotional states, relationships, intimacy, loss and vulnerability as source material for her artworks. As such she does not talk about the meaning behind each work she produces, preferring instead for the viewer to infer their own meaning or for the work to speak to the viewer in its own particular way.

Her titles are often clues and thus the phrase “laying back” suggests a posture of rest however in other works the word “lying” is often associated with being laid bare emotionally or physically. As such this work could also be seen to be directly related to her infamous ‘My Bed’.

Emin once said in an interview “I have no ideas…. that’s not how it works”.