Tracey Emin turned down an offer to re-create her famous work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 after it was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004, she told an audience at the opening of her retrospective in Edinburgh, reports the Times (London).

The British art-world enfant terrible said she had been contacted by Saatchi Gallery after the fire in East London, which ruined about 100 works by artists also including Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman, and offered £1 million ($1.96 million), the amount of the insurance payout, to make a copy of the work.

“To recreate it would have been morally wrong," said Emin, who admitted she was upset by the offer. "It wouldn't have that emotional input to it."

A tent with 102 names sewn into its sides, the work was not just a laundry list of her lovers, said Emin; it also included names given to her aborted fetuses as well as those of relatives she had slept with as a child. “It was really sweet, it smelt nice, it was cozy. It wasn't simply the names of everyone I'd ever slept with. It was about intimacy.”

Emin's retrospective is on view at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art through November 9.