Tracey Emin Makes Me Uncomfortable – I Finally Know Why

Twenty-seven years after Tracey Emin’s detritus-strewn bed appalled the nation, it’s back, in the biggest survey exhibition of her work ever staged, and with a monumental gravitas befitting the woman who can surely claim to be the most significant British artist of her generation.

Emin has always been controversial – even before My Bed (1998) proved to haters that she was a narcissistic layabout, she was the most notorious of the YBAs, best known for her sweary, drunken appearance on a TV debate.

She’s a dame now, and a changed woman. Cancer almost killed her in 2020, and saving her life necessitated the removal of her uterus, ovaries, lymph nodes, urethra, urinary tract, bladder, and part of her colon. She thought she might have six months to live, but she has been in remission since 2024. “Someone” – does she mean God? – “said let’s just give her another chance and see what happens,” she told curator Maria Balshaw, for whom the exhibition marks the end of her tenure as Tate director.

What happened was her “second life”, the unexpected, redemptive blossoming that gives the show its title. It takes stock of her 40-year career, and marks her new impetus as a painter following her move back to her home town of Margate in 2020.

Here she has set up an art school, among other philanthropic ventures, and she paints with a renewed sense of purpose: “That’s what cancer is pretty good for: it really makes you stop in your tracks,” she tells critic Martin Gayford, whose book on Emin, My Heart is This, published to coincide with the exhibition, puts her in company with his other notable subjects, Lucian Freud and David Hockney.

It’s not just her quasi-saintly transformation that has brought affirmation – if “being an artist” means demonstrating traditional skills, then recent years have brought growing recognition of her ability to command an expressive line.

Even so, there are plenty who struggle to accept her. I have a foot in that camp myself – Emin makes me uncomfortable. It might be because I’m British, and therefore culturally conditioned to be embarrassed by the messy details of people’s bodies and minds. But I don’t think it’s that – I think it’s because she sees me. After all these years, I still can’t quite look at the woman who, when I was a student, broke the code of silence that all women seemed unwittingly in thrall to.

My Bed entered the fray in 1999, when the tabloid press – on a break from hacking phones – was in a frenzy of panic about “ladettes”, who in a perverse rejection of the hairy-armpitted bra-burners of our mothers’ generation, took the view that feminism was about doing everything the boys were doing, and then some.

If you were up for it (specifically sex, booze and fags) – you were cool, and a laugh (just so long as you weren’t a slag), and if you weren’t, you were boring and frigid. Really not cool at all was discussing our femaleness. Your period, not getting your period, the blood, the pain, the emotional chasm that opened up once a month – made so much deeper and darker by all that fitting in and being fun.

It was frowned upon to voice nagging doubts about the “equality” we thought we had so cleverly established with the boys, that left us free to down pints of lager, but still in charge of housework, and contraception, and with systemic misogyny and pay disparity in the workplace. Hedonism was the answer – if you were having a good enough time, you didn’t have to think about it.

When it appeared in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition, My Bed was ridiculed and dismissed by men, who insisted on calling it Emin’s “unmade” bed, as if the most distressing thing about it was not the psychological and physical disintegration it so brutally represented, but her slipshod housekeeping.

So much noisy derision made My Bed all the more painful and difficult to see: here in graphic detail was the very thing we’d been obediently shutting away. I recognised this miserable bed, this state of mind, the series of expectations and failures it represents – I and all the girls I knew lived a bit like this, some of the time. Here were all the things we couldn’t talk about – the reality of our bodies versus magazine images of waifs in hipster jeans, the need to be like the boys but also desirable and compliant, fun girls who didn’t make a fuss, weren’t needy, didn’t nag.

The burden of silence was such that, famously, when David Frost discussed My Bed on breakfast TV, he mentioned the “condoms”, but not the “other things”. The staples of female experience – tampons, dirty underwear, pregnancy tests – were simply too disgusting to name.

Now, finally, the immense significance of My Bed is honoured in a low-lit gallery, in which one of Emin’s Rodinesque bronze sculptures is mounted on the wall, evoking not the lonely squalor of a council flat, but the dignity, and sanctity of a chapel.

Marking the halfway point of the show, from here, we follow Emin’s “second life” as it unfolds through two brightly lit galleries, hung with a flurry of recent, large-scale canvases, which in paintings like The Bridge (2024), combine elements of visceral intimacy with a transcendent sort of spiritualism, in which the female body stands for a grand, all-enveloping force.

But though Emin’s vision has undoubtedly matured and expanded, to find bigger, even universal resonances in her personal experience, her paintings are not always convincing, and sometimes they’re tedious, as with the too predictable image of a dark, reaper-like figure in I watched Myself die and come alive (2023). Her draughtsmanship is a different matter, her quavering, responsive line, economical and baroque by turn, twitching like an exposed nerve.

Emin was mocked for her drawing in the past, and yet looking afresh at the embroidered blankets, this is evidently unjust. In Just Like Nothing (2009), a continuous line wavers like a dangerously unravelling thread as it describes her own naked body, the slow action of hand-sewing miraculously still achieving the deft fluidity of pencil on paper.

Her small sculptures from a few years later benefit from the same delicacy of line, their small size so beguilingly tactile, a reminder that Emin, so often looking for love, makes art that gives comfort, not just to herself but to others.

One of her most moving works from her early career, and among her best overall, is her quilted blanket The Last of the Gold (2002), an “A-Z of abortion” made in the aftermath of her own experiences in the 1990s, in which she records advice for women facing an abortion.

It is so carefully done, the advice so kindly and wisely given, in layers of appliqué invested with the love usually reserved for expectant mothers. The ink is faded now, and you have to strain to read her tips, which include consulting Talking Pages, and more timeless advice, to “Exercise and try not to get out of your head as some deep-seated emotions could come flying to the surface when you least expect them”.

It belongs to the tradition of quilts and blankets as stores of female wisdom, to be cherished and handed down, made all the more poignant by the implicit acknowledgement that there will be no future generations in Emin’s line – she is “the last of the gold”. The current precarious state of women’s bodily autonomy makes it all the more precious.

It’s not often that an artist’s retrospective leaves you feeling excited about what’s coming next – but it’s the mark of a very special artist when you look back on work so utterly rooted in its time, all the while watching it gain new force and urgency today.

‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’ is at the Tate Modern, London, from 27 February to 31 August