A lifelong fascination with the Norwegian creator of The Scream has been turned into 15 tonnes of bronze, soon to be installed at a new museum in Oslo

‘Munch’s mother died when he was very young,” says Tracey Emin. “So I want to give him a mother.” And what a mother she is giving him. The artist’s nine-metre bronze colossus will be unveiled in 2020, at the new Munch Museum in Oslo harbour. Emin has been fascinated by Edvard Munch’s brokenhearted art all her life. Now her giant Mother will be a permanent feature of the fjord he so famously depicted under a blood red sky in The Scream.

Yet this monumental image of a naked woman kneeling and hunched over an invisible child began as a small, fragile, handmade object. “It started off with me playing with clay,” says Emin, who didn’t think she had a chance when she entered the international competition to find a public artwork for Oslo’s Museum Island. Other candidates included the acclaimed Scandinavian artists Olafur Eliasson and Ragnar Kjartansson. But intimacy won.

“I put in the little maquette and then watercolours of her on the island, and all the technical stuff. Apparently when they opened it up and took it out of the box, they fell in love with it. You can see that she’s old. My answer to that is, ‘Haven’t you ever loved someone who is old?’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The stunning Munchmuseet, Oslo, designed by estudio Herreros, which opens in spring. Photograph: Ivar Kvaal

Why turn this delicate creation into a nine-metre monument? Well, Emin has been experimenting with scale since 2016, when she made digitally printed enlargements of little figures she shaped in clay. When I saw the first results, in white plasticky material in her studio, the effect was startling – because her thumb and finger marks were enlarged too, perforating and scarring the statue. Before this she wasn’t much interested in big art. Her (rejected) proposal for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth was a family of little meerkats.

So why go huge? “One reason is being close to Louise Bourgeois and seeing how she could go from small to giant. You can’t just make anything big – it was about finding the right form.”

Now Mother is making the journey from maquette to 15 tonnes of bronze. “It’s being sand-cast in Stoke-on-Trent by the Westley Group,” says Emin. “They do submarines and stuff like that. It’s being made in 97 separate pieces, then they will be welded together in three sections and shipped to Oslo in giant cargo ships.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Munch’s The Scream. Photograph: Alamy

The original setting for the statue was “a sort of rocky terrain”. But Emin, a keen gardener and vegetable grower, has persuaded the funders to create a green environment instead. People won’t just be able to use the little park, she says: “They can go swimming from it as well. The Mother will welcome ships and protect everybody. She looks quite strong but also loving.”

Emin had already been commissioned to show her art alongside Munch’s in the new museum’s opening exhibition in spring, which will tour to the Royal Academy in London. Her attempt to give Munch back the mother he lost is the culmination of a lifetime’s love affair with the artist who found new ways to symbolise emotion. His paintings are stains of loss, grief and isolation.

“Munch’s my favourite artist in the whole world. He’s gentle, he’s emotional and he’s just a really, really fantastic painter. He was spiritual, poetic, very very handsome. And he worked really hard.” She has one other intriguing detail to add about the father of modern expressionism: “He was one of the first Norwegians to have a telephone.”

To create her double homage, the show and statue, Emin immersed herself in the life of Munch, who spent most of his time in Oslo. He died there in 1944, and the city is now setting out to celebrate him more then ever. “I’ve had full access to the Munch archive,” says Emin. “Even his hats.”