The Vulnerability of Tracey Emin

I lose blissful track of who you and I and me and we and she are across British artist Tracey Emin’s 35-year oeuvre. Pronouns and modes of address range across mediums and sentiments, highs and lows. In neon and paint, pencil and ink, in letters embroidered and etched, sometimes carved, they implore, cajole, caress, castigate, confront, promise, dream and fantasize. They seem to address everyone and no one, someone we will never know or someone we may ourselves have already been. For example:

No you go fuck yourself – Do you remember me – I’m going to get you, you cunt, you bastard – No your [sic] sexy – Meet me in heaven I will wait for you – People Like You Need to Fuck People Like Me – But I never stopped loving you – She Lay down Deep Beneath The Sea – Death resides over you – We became one – You!

In other works, like Emin’s big, bright textiles predominantly made in the early 1990s, it is as if a whole conversation – whispered under the sheets or yelled down the street after pub closing time – is taking place across a quilt or a blanket that could also be used to cover and comfort. Before the soft, wall-hung covering, reading texts that run in every direction, letters sometimes entirely scrambled, you can feel perspective dissolving. Does it matter? No, because you and I and me and we and she can all understand how it feels.

Some phrases repeat in works that span years or decades, including pieces in Emin’s latest exhibition, ‘I followed you to the end’, where some 40 new works fill the vast galleries of White Cube Bermondsey. The show, which opened last month, could be called a break-up album – tracing the wild arc of having loved and lost in a recent relationship – but it is also about mortality, recovery, defiance, language and, perhaps above all, painting.

I don’t have a practice. That’s for the kids. I’m an artist. I make art. Tracey Emin

Emin’s tableaux are characterized by a liquid, almost writhing, sinuous line recognizable from her very earliest pieces. When I visited the artist in Margate this June, the creative director of her studios, Harry Weller, pulled out some archival drawers holding works from her time at Maidstone College of Art in 1983–86, where she studied printmaking. I was stunned to notice in her woodcuts, that most rigid of mediums, the same quivering line. It has no hard angles, is confident – one thin stroke, but never quite straight – and, while it seems to know where it’s going, often surprises you.

Throughout Emin’s newest paintings, this line is often the line of a body – one or two, sometimes so tangled they are indistinguishable, limbs akimbo. A neck, an elbow, a knee, a long leg straight or bent, softly rounded breasts, hair streaming over shoulders or across a pillow. In Take Me To Heaven (2024), a bed is inscribed in faint lines of plum purple and navy blue, with a figure at its centre loosely drawn in bright red – lying back but also, almost, hovering, a halo above her head, amidst the flattened pastel background that constitutes her surroundings. Her face is a scribble of red paint from which a few drips extend in thin verticals, collapsing the fragile logic of surface and image. Her form, too, dissolves and exceeds itself into streams of red: a hand becomes a series of dense diagonals and blood seems to flow from her vagina, with her labia at the centre of the image like a red rose. Smaller works on canvas board have her familiar forms even more condensed and entwined, like intimate abstractions: red and blue and black lines turning and turning around each other like a lover’s embrace – or quarrel.

When I ask Emin how her images relate to abstraction and figuration, she politely but firmly corrects my terminology. ‘They’re not images, they’re feelings.’ (Another word she objects to, refreshingly, is ‘practice’: ‘I don’t have a practice. That’s for the kids. I’m an artist. I make art.’) In the manner of her expressionist forerunners, such as Wassily Kandinsky – who wrote in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), ‘that is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul’ – Emin describes her paintings as coming from the deep and ineffable within. To quote the title of her 1997 show at the South London Gallery, ‘I need art like I need God’, which I understand to mean: art is her ultimate faith.

‘It is absolutely cathartic,’ she says of making work, ‘and I never would have used that word years ago because it would have been considered embarrassing. But things have changed,’ she adds, hinting at the degree to which emotion – long her subject – in art is no longer condescendingly dismissed as ‘girlish’ or ‘female’. Emin’s works can look simple or spontaneous, but are deeply layered with days or even months of overpainting. She spends long hours in the studio, often working late into the night, either alone (with her cats, Teacup and Pancake) or with the 31-year-old Weller, who has worked with her since he was 18. Weller shows me a video on his phone of Emin in an animated state, wielding her paintbrush like a tennis racquet and hitting the canvas with great, satisfying thuds. She lets out short burst-like screams or grunts, stopping only to refuel with more white paint that she smacks onto the work in percussive splashes. In this sense her images, so redolent with bodies, also hold her own body.

Who wants to be remembered as just a YBA artist? Tracey Emin

Four years ago, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Emin was diagnosed with an aggressive bladder cancer that required a near-immediate six-hour operation to remove her bladder, urethra, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, part of her colon and part of her vagina. At one point during our conversation she offers, without a trace of self-pity, that ‘living with no bladder is really hard’, and I’m not sure what to say in response because I know I simply can’t imagine it, never mind living without the other organs, too. With no bladder, your liver and kidneys work overtime to do its job, you’re highly susceptible to sepsis, frequently on antibiotics, and live with chronic pain. Some portraits show a urostomy bag trailing from the stomach of her nude female forms, a direct reflection of how her body, so embedded in her art, has changed inside and out. On less energetic days, Emin sits in front of her canvases on a chair and fills their backgrounds with elaborate patterns – crystalline, web-like geometries or floral motifs like a field of floating borage. We might see these, too, as records of bodily recovery or endurance held by the work: a kind of catharsis, a comfort; art continues even when it seems physically impossible.

Emin earned her master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in 1989 but hated its conservative atmosphere: ‘After all that I’d been through, I’d say those were the worst years of my life,’ she writes in a text work titled Tracey Emin C.V. (1995). ‘A fucking unsimpathetic [sic] shit hole’. I ask Emin how she knows when a painting is finished. ‘When Harry tells me it is,’ she replies with a cheeky smile. ‘He takes it away or else I might ruin it.’ Weller might operate as a second set of eyes in the studio, but Emin knows painting inside out. ‘I used to play this game at the Royal College of Art with my friend David Dawson, who later became Lucian Freud’s assistant,’ she tells me. ‘We would choose a painting and say: “Has it got the thing?” You know what I mean?’ I do know what she means – the often indescribable thing that makes a painting work – and, immediately, we start listing off the names of artists: Richard Diebenkorn, whom she adores, Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell. Helen Frankenthaler, of whom she’s unconvinced, but I make a hard sell for her print works. After a while, my mind goes blank and I start to throw out random canonized greats – Chaïm Soutine, Rembrandt – and she looks at me like I’m a bit simple: ‘Well, of course.’ Louise Bourgeois, I offer, and she says: ‘Yes, yes, but Louise was really doing something different.’

Emin and Bourgeois, both prolific excavators of selfhood, collaborated on a series of drawings titled ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ (2009–10), shortly before the latter’s death in 2010. Bourgeois started, painting loose, watery gouache forms – male or female torsos, sometimes combining genders – and passed them to Emin. ‘I carried the images around the world with me, from Australia to France, but I was too scared to touch them,’ she later said, in an interview with Hauser & Wirth. Eventually, however, she inscribed the works with line drawings and texts inside Bourgeois’s soft, amoebic bodies, her errant phrases becoming their titles:

Too much love

Waiting for you

Deep inside my heart

I wanted to love you more

Here we are, back to those travelling pronouns that could be issued forth as though to an epistolary lover, but in Emin’s work they are also an open address to be heard and shared, met halfway. Like the famous confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath or the fluid, form-bending essays of French literary theorist Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine (feminine writing), Emin’s ultimate art is her preternatural investment in vulnerability. I say preternatural because she’s had decades to be worn down by ungenerous critics who have spent miles of column inches assigning her art and life varieties of shame – gendered, classist, racist – which she obviously doesn’t feel herself. Nonetheless, she continues her work with unabated, almost triumphant openness. At one point in our conversation, I realize I’m about to ask a very personal question about illness and loneliness, so reassure her she needn’t answer, at which her eyes light up a little, like it’s a dare she’ll never lose.

As with Plath, this tendency is not about self-exposure but connection: the work is never solely about its author. We talk about her video How It Feels (1996), which Emin made to share her experience of abortion (in this case terribly botched) with other women, given how little information was, and arguably still is, available about the procedure; and her quilt works, some of which were included in the Barbican’s recent exhibition ‘Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textile in Art’. ‘I was so happy to see those quilts exhibited as political, for everyone,’ she says, again thinking back to how her work has been pigeonholed in the past.

I Never Stopped Loving You (2010) reads a bright pink neon work installed on the white Margate clocktower that marks where the long curve of the city’s harbour arm begins its reach into the lowest stretch of the North Sea. Emin gifted the piece – shaped in her recognizable scrawl – to the place of her birth, ten years before she returned in 2020, when she decided she wanted to live differently. ‘Who wants to be remembered as just a YBA artist?’ Emin asks, looking vaguely horrified at the thought.

Emin’s ultimate art is her preternatural investment in vulnerability.

Before I meet her and we settle into the sunlit courtyard just off her kitchen to speak, Weller shows me around what we might call ‘the Emin complex’: her studio, a vast space with vaulted ceilings, skylights and an office/archive mezzanine; an empty, chapel-like room (an old bathhouse, like so many of Margate’s now-repurposed buildings) for staging exhibitions before they travel to their venue; and three Victorian townhouses joined together as a residence, guest apartment, office, dining room and meeting space. In spite of their grand scale, the spaces are spare and plain – white walls, stripped back floorboards, careful attention to subtle woodworking details (her twin brother Paul did some of the carpentry), and each room holds a different selection of antique chairs (her collection is exquisite).

Five minutes away, another former Edwardian bathhouse, mortuary and children’s nursery have been transformed by Emin into a block of affordable-rent studios, a residency programme for ten artists a year and an exhibition space: TKE Studios. (Her middle name is Karima.) She gifted the standalone brick mortuary building to The Perfect Place To Grow – a sustainable employment organization that trains 18- to 24-year-olds to become chefs. It’s early when I arrive, so only one resident artist is present, but she speaks glowingly of her time there and of how Emin has pushed her and her peers to be harder on themselves. I get the sense that Emin doesn’t pull any punches. ‘It’s nice,’ she says. ‘If I don’t feel like painting, I just wander down there, look at their work and talk about art.’ I ask her what it’s all for, waving my hand at the buildings around us with their labyrinthine connected passages, the art school and studios down the road. She grins and squints a little, eyes glinting, joking but also not, ‘Well, I’m a great artist, aren’t I?’

‘Everyone takes care of each other here,’ Emin tells me of Margate. ‘The big galleries help the little galleries. We all work together. It’s a community.’ The passages about Margate in Strangeland, her 2005 memoir that also collects texts from a selection of previous works, can make for a difficult read. They chronicle class and race discrimination, childhood sexual abuse, precarity and family privation – problems that no doubt persist in the Thanet area, which has the highest poverty rates in Kent. But Strangeland also features glittering seas, the sweeping expanse of Margate sands, pink sunsets and romance, flights of fantasy, affairs and heartbreak, and the making of an artist: a Künstlerroman.

I followed you to the end (2024), the titular painting of Emin’s White Cube exhibition, shows a dark frontal figure, her upper half shrouded in crimson and squiggles of black that ooze from the upper-left corner. We might be looking at her lying down from directly above or standing straight up, looming, floating, perhaps a paintbrush in her right hand. On the lower half of the painting, a pale expanse like paper, Emin’s line morphs, as so often, into writing:

You made me like this, all of you – you – You men that I loved so much – You are the ones that made me feel so alone – All of you – Each of you in your own individual way – I – I – I was at fault to keep loving you – Like a fool I followed Love to the end – Like the sad haunted soul that I am – I FOLLOWED YOU to THE END.

Although it’s a tale of loneliness and pain, it evokes Gertrude Stein’s ecstatic poetic repetitions: ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’, each subsequent rose made different by the previous. Stein wrote this in her 1913 poem ‘Sacred Emily’. Emin picks up this rhythm in various works: ‘a cunt is a rose is a cunt’ and ‘a hole is a hole’. Here, however, it is the singular pronoun, ‘I – I – I’, that is repeated: perhaps a different woman each time; perhaps, to borrow from Simone de Beauvoir’s famous observation in The Second Sex (1949), a lone woman in a constant state of becoming woman. Catharsis comes from the Greek katharos (pure) and kathairein (cleanse), a purgation through drama and art, if you’re lucky. In Emin’s work, the end may be the end of love, but it is also something sublime and beyond what we know. The artist’s liquid line keeps moving and adapting, refusing to be still, so that every ending is also a beginning.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 246 with the headline ‘Tracey Emin’

Tracey Emin’s ‘I followed you to the end’ is on view at White Cube Bermondsey, London, from 19 September – 10 November

_{Main image: Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, Come Unto Me (detail), 2009-10, archival dyes printed on cloth, 61 × 68 cm. Courtesy: © Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois; photograph: Christopher Burke, New York}