Diagnosed with cancer during the 2020 lockdown, Tracey Emin underwent radical surgery for bladder cancer. That hasn’t stopped her returning to art with, if anything, increased vigour following her move from London to Margate. Her show at White Cube Bermondsey contains over 40 recent paintings as well as two sculptures and the new film ‘Tears of Blood’, which depicts the stoma she now has. Love, loss and bodily trauma run throughout. This is my edit of her conversation with Susan May (Global Artistic Director of White Cube) prior to the opening. The show, one painting and a monumental sculpture are all titled ‘I followed you to the end’.
Installation image with ‘I Followed you to the end’, 2024 (patinated bronze), © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Photo © White Cube (Theo Christelis)
What was the starting point for this body of work?
I don’t really work towards a body of work, I just work all the time. So it wasn’t planned as such, it was not curated, it was just the work I was making. I had half the studio with the paintings for my Xavier Hufkens show, so the other side of the studio was my White Cube show. Then I got frustrated and angry about something, and started writing over one of the paintings – when I write a lot on paintings, I never know what I’m going to write, it’s just automatic – and the words ‘I followed you to the end’ came out. I was thinking about when you would do everything for someone, and about my life, and how everything works, and where and what is the end of life… I could have called the big sculpture anything, but she’s gone, and all that’s left is a big fat fucking arse sticking up in the air saying ‘yeah, alright, I can take it’.
Tracey Emin: ‘I Followed you to the end’, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 184 x 122 cm © Tracey Emin. Photo © White Cube (Eva Herzog)
You seem to be galvanised by surviving cancer?
When you look death in the face – and I’m not talking about the near-crash accident, though I’ve had a few of them! – when you get told you’ve got six months to live, you think ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ I thought ‘What if I drop dead being a mediocre YBA from the 90’s? I don’t think so, I’d better pull my socks up!’ But I didn’t think it would turn out like this, and going home to Margate was so lovely because Margate has changed and I’ve really changed. I just feel that, while life is more gentle for me in Margate, I can be more fierce in what I have to do.
Tracey Emin: ‘More Fucking’, 2024 – Acrylic on canvas, 27.4 x 27.4 cm (framed). © Tracey Emin. Photo Paul Carey-Kent.
Have those experiences changed the work?
I realised quite a lot of my paintings were getting spiritual, I needed to express how much I believed in all these other worlds, and I needed my work to give me some kind of solace and understanding of who I am as I get older. I’ve had this really beautiful time painting, and that’s why there’s so much work – I really love what I do. I realised that my work – and my behaviour, though I’m quite quiet these days! – is what I’m going to be judged on. So if I don’t express myself the way I want to, I’ve failed terribly.
And, as corny as it seems, the work is really sincere and genuine. If it looks like a cliché, or too much, or over the top, it’s me – and that freedom makes me feel whole. Art is one of the only things left you can do for its own sake. It’s a pure thing that comes from a realm which we’re not completely sure about. That’s why we like artists, why we think it’s special. The Turin shroud wouldn’t be the Turin shroud if people didn’t go and see it, and art is like that, it has an alchemy for those who take part by looking at it. So if you are going to be responsible for that you have to be totally honest.
Painting is very much the centre of what you do?
If all the work I’ve made – the embroideries, films, photographs, performances, everything – were a mountain, and I was climbing up and got to the peak of the mountain, got my flagpole, stuck it in so my flag blows in the wind, that is my painting. It’s taken me all that time to get up the rock face, all those different things to understand what is really important to me, and it’s painting. Back in the 90’s at the Royal College of Art and I was doing these combinations of Edvard Munch and Byzantine frescoes. They weren’t that popular, and I threw them all in a skip when I was pregnant – but my painting wasn’t an affectation. I had a travel scholarship worth so much money on condition that I didn’t travel, but went into college every day throughout the summer and painted. I had two tutors: Ken Kiff taught me all about different colours and mixing, and Alan Miller taught me how to prime the canvases and all about brushes and every paint you could use. And the technician, Peter Allen, taught me how to make my own stretchers. It was amazing. Then I left college and found that painting was wholly unacceptable in the 1990’s, especially if you were a figurative painter, so I just went ‘OK I’ll write’. So I started hanging out with those ‘young artists’, and that was it – I was caught up in the whirl of it – I was happy to be caught up. But I never stopped drawing. Before I was asked to do Venice in 2007 I’d decided only to paint, but then at the last minute I didn’t have the confidence to show them all. By then I’d been painting full-on for a year.
Installation image with ‘Tears of Blood’, © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Photo © White Cube (Theo Christelis)
There’s plenty of blood and tears in the paintings, and also in the film ‘Tears of Blood’. Can you tell us about that?
If you have a stoma, sometimes it bleeds… my stoma is for urine, a urostomy, quite unusual, it bleeds from chemical reactions with what you eat or drink, or because it’s slightly ulcerated. It’s not a big deal, not a bad thing, but it’s an annoying thing that happens almost every day. This film is of my daily ritual when I change my bag: my stoma is often bleeding. A bit like ‘My Bed’ in 1998, I thought ‘I hate it so much!’ and then ‘No! It’s actually quite beautiful, it depends how you look at it.’ Because my stoma keeps me alive, and it’s a positive thing that my blood is flowing. And even though it’s hard to make sense of what it is, it’s pulsing, it’s alive, so I thought it would be image which really goes well with the show.
I have my bag now, taped to my leg – otherwise I’d have no control, might have to get up and go to the loo at any moment, or be thinking about needing to get up. And the last thing I want is my bag to burst when I’m meeting important people – like the King… It’s not like I’m waving a stoma flag, and if you have one it’s a real pain in life, but a lot of people keep their stoma secret. Then, on top of all the pain, when something does go wrong it’s weird. So I think it is useful to see it, and it’s a beautiful image. Of course there are references to the wounds of Christ, to suffering… And there’s so much suffering going on now – it’s not that we need to be reminded of it, but we need to be reminded to try to stop it.
There are lots of beds in the show?
Well, the bed is brilliant, because – what am I known for? Everyone always asked me when I sold my bed to Charles Saatchi ‘what did you do afterwards?’ – and I went and bought sheets with a thousand count thread, and the best duvet money can buy! I made a luxurious bed, and I’ve stuck to it ever since. And a bed for me is the golden section – if I spray some lines and turn the canvas I often end up with a bed. And I like the shape: it can become a ship, a platform, a house, and the shape of it is really good within the painting to fit with painting lots of things.
Tracey Emin: ‘The End of Love’, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 205 x 282 cm © Tracey Emin. Photo © White Cube (Eva Herzog)
Cats appear in some paintings. What’s the story there?
For twenty years I had Dockett, who got pretty famous. He was a bit of a bruiser, he came from Vallance Road where the Kray twins were. He died in 2020, and the big joke was that people used to ask me what would happen when Docket went, and I’d say ‘I’ll go at the same time’ – and the thing is, I nearly did! I didn’t think I could get another cat, because I loved Dockett so much, so I decided – before I got cancer – to get a dog. Then the cancer hit, and when they asked if I had any final questions before the operation I said ‘can I get a dog?’ and they said ‘no’, which is what told me I might not live very long, because they don’t tell you that directly. Afterwards, when a friend suggested I get another cat I was angry: nothing could replace Docket! But six months later she sent me a picture of these amazing cats, and said ‘the farmer needs to know now’. I said ‘I’ll have them both!’ And I got Teacup and Pancake, and they are the sweetest, loveliest little animals in the world. They follow me everywhere, they keep me company and I swear that every day they’re with me they make me feel better and make me a better person. So they’re in the paintings. And it’s really good to have to look after a pet because then you look after yourself.
Photo: Tracey Emin, 2024, photo by Harry Weller Courtesy White Cube
‘I followed you to the end’ is at White Cube, Bermondsey to November 10