Tracey Emin is planning to leave east London, where she has lived and worked for decades, after a losing a protracted battle with Tower Hamlets council to expand her art studio, she has told the Guardian.

The Turner prize-nominated artist was refused planning permission to build a studio and living space adjoining her Spitalfields studio space after the project faced vocal opposition from local conservation groups.

Now she says she plans to search for a new space on the Kent coast, where she grew up, after withdrawing her appeal against the refusal last week.

“Why would you want to be somewhere you’re not wanted?” she said, discussing the project in public for the first time. “What I’m going to do now is move out of London. I don’t have any choice on that … There’s places now in Britain that are desperate for artists – Margate’s thriving, Folkestone, Hastings. All that Kent coast. And I could have a giant studio and be really relaxed.”

Emin says she is joining a wave of artists leaving London, although she faces fewer financial constraints than most. “A lot of the creative people are having to move out of London because it’s not conducive,” she said. “Berlin, for example, helps artists build studios, helps them find land. Berlin understands that having artists inside the inner city is good karma, interesting.”

Her decision to withdraw from the fight to extend her base in Spitalfields was due in large part to the death of her mother, Pam, two months ago. “I was going to have my mum live there. That was part of my big plan … And that’s not going to happen now,” she said.

Tracey Emin at her studio in east London in 2009. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Bereavement also made Emin reassess whether she wanted to fight on. “I’m in a vulnerable place right now,” she said, describing the prospect of appearing at formal appeal hearings as daunting. “I was scared about having to take all these people on my own – it’s a big thing.”

Emin had planned to demolish a listed 1920s property to build a studio, showroom and living space designed by the Stirling prize-winning studio David Chipperfield Architects. It would have been connected to the existing studio and offices she converted in 2008, which she says are too small for her needs.

“I’m an international artist who hasn’t got enough room to swing a cat at the moment,” she said, sitting on a couch in her studio, a high-ceilinged room lined with paintings in progress and dominated by a giant plaster maquette of a woman’s torso. The basement houses a softly lit swimming pool, and upstairs are two floors of offices, one of which is currently being renovated, where eight staff work.

“It does feel like a huge amount of space but I can assure you it’s not, especially compared to some of my male counterparts,” she said.

Chipperfield’s design would have been “a dream come true for Tower Hamlets”, Emin said, particularly as he rarely does private buildings: his current projects include remodelling the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Mughal Museum in Agra, India.

The plans would have allowed her to live and work on the same site – something she said was increasingly important with age. “As an artist you work till five in the morning … You don’t have 9-5, you work when it takes you,” she said. “I’m a single woman and I walk home.”

She bought the site on Bell Lane for £3.5m in 2013, when it had planning approval for a scheme that involved demolishing most of the building but keeping two facades, and building a five-storey apartment block.

But her new proposal to demolish the existing building at 66-68 Bell Lane drew stiff local resistance, with nearly 60 objections lodged with the council. One described the design as “ugly, an eyesore and a triumph for money over the preservation of local history, style and local aesthetics”. Emin said conservation officers were supportive of the plans when they were consulted during the design stage, but the planning committee ruled against it in February.

Emin says she has been wounded by the opposition she faced from a community where she has worked since 1993, and where she lives in a listed Georgian house. “It’s not like I’ve just come in and saw it as a financial opportunity … If I knocked it down and built a hotel or flats I could greatly benefit. I could build eight, nine, 10 flats in here. But instead I employ people.”

She has found the tone of the debate hurtful. “I just feel I’ve been pretty bullied by the whole thing and I don’t want to be bullied any more … I don’t get the reaction I get from people,” she said.

Emin, who is currently on a year’s sabbatical, intends to keep her existing studio and offices, and her house, but to move her main base out of the area. “Tower Hamlets says we don’t want you … well, there’s plenty of other places that do. It’s that simple,” she said.

“My mum’s death brought home to me what it is I really need, what it is I want at the moment. I want my mum, and that’s never going to happen again, and I’ve got to find a way of going forward and being able to do my work.”