Tracey Emin: Art's Great Survivor on Cancer, Trauma and Tate Triumph
As her cat Tea-Cup glides across the kitchen table in her Margate seaside home, Tracey Emin radiates excitement about her new ninety-work exhibition, A Second Life, at Tate Modern. This blockbuster show shockingly divides her career into two distinct phases: life BC and life AC—Before Cancer and After Cancer.
Before Cancer and After Cancer: A Life Divided
Dressed entirely in black, sipping tea while piano music fills her white-painted rooms, Emin resembles a chess queen awaiting medication to manage bleeding and pain. Though her cancer is in remission, the aftermath remains searing. "I put all my energy into art, always have done, always will—against death or illness or pain, art wins," she declares with a grin. "Remember, my surgeon called me a miracle woman."
Her cheerful demeanor—candid, funny, shocking, and revealing over two hours—proves heroic as she outlines the exhibition's first half: "Margate, Cyprus, family, rape, abortion, abuse, unhappiness, sadness." The Tate's main corridor separates her work with a "very bloody painting", leading to the iconic My Bed—a monument to chaotic life featuring crumpled sheets, empty bottles, used condoms, and detritus.
"It was something that saved me in lots of ways," Emin explains. "So I put it into the second half of my life, even though it belongs in the first. Why? Because after cancer, my life is unrecognisable. The only thing I've still got going for me is painting, is art. The art stayed the same, but nothing else."
From Despair to Damehood: An Unlikely Journey
Emin's journey has been long and turbulent. Early on, she projected an image of not taking herself seriously—drunken escapades, outrage, constant partying. But that era has passed. Today, Tate Modern honors her with this ultimate accolade, the King has made her a Dame, the British Museum appointed her a trustee, and the Royal Academy named her Professor of Drawing.
She now stands unquestionably as the eminence grise of women in the art world, with works commanding millions. Yet this nearly became a life cut short by sexual violence, poverty, homelessness, loneliness, and shattered confidence. "I was going to jump off Waterloo Bridge with my baby if I did not have an abortion," she reveals. Later, she survived on £1-an-hour wages in a sex shop.
The Tate exhibition documents these highs and lows, serving as a joyous validation for Britain's greatest female artist through candid, vivid, and beautiful work—even when delving into darkness. She enters the portals of the Greats with this show, despite looking back at "the trail of despair, destruction, desire and dodgy men." Yet her art transcends human cost, empowering transformation as only art can.
Confronting Trauma: Rape and Renaissance
Dark facts remain inseparable from Emin's stellar rise. As she celebrates her Tate show, it marks exactly fifty years since she was raped at age thirteen—just a few hundred yards from where we sit in her tranquil, unusually warm house. The assault occurred in a poorly lit alleyway by someone she knew, who went on to attack other women.
Margate has since been both nemesis and sanctuary. Recently, her friend Madonna visited to see art in the seaside resort Emin champions. The two Margate mavens made international news wandering through town. "We go back a long way, and I was so glad she came to see the art and that she loved Margate," Emin says proudly.
She has transformed Margate into an artists' mecca, owning around twenty houses converted into studios and accommodation—even turning a morgue into a community restaurant. This extraordinary property portfolio, dubbed Traceyville, partly serves as an antidote to her shockingly impoverished beginnings. Daily, she finds joy seeing artists secure what she never had: a supportive place to work.
The Cancer Diagnosis: A Second Life Begins
Returning to her exhibition's defining theme—before and after cancer—Emin recalls her 2019 diagnosis. A massive surgical operation eviscerated her body, leaving her with a permanent stoma replacing her bladder. She accepts this stoically, like everything in her rollercoaster life, and miraculously, it has become part of her art. A Second Life testifies to grit, determination, brilliance, and originality.
It seems a dozen turbulent lives crammed into six decades: rape, two abortions, suicide threats, homelessness, grinding poverty, abandonment, and troubling personal revelations—including a life without sex for ten years. Yet what emerges triumphantly is her obsessional need to make art, finding dizzying happiness in this totemic Tate show.
For years, some wrote her off as too bad, mad, or dangerous to know. A small painting of her bathroom sink—"a bit coals to Newcastle" she quips—epitomizes her emotional bursts celebrating what she sees, creates, and shares. All this persists despite cancer defining recent years.
"It was not like most other people's. It almost destroyed me," she admits. "The most frightening thing is when you're told you have cancer; everybody sees their life flash before them. I was sort of philosophical because I knew something was wrong—I was bleeding all the time. The irony is, I was feeling on top of the f***ing world. I was madly in love, considering having sex for the first time in ten years."
She describes a moment of supreme happiness: sunbathing naked on her roof in Fournier Street, hidden but chatting with a vicar across the way, champagne in hand. "I thought, I've never been so happy." Then, discovering "lots of blood, really thick, strange blood", she knew something was wrong.
A scan followed, and while staring at an unfinished painting in her studio, her gynaecologist called. "'Are you sitting?' and I went, 'Yeah. It's not good news. Is it?' She said, 'No, it's not.' 'Oh,' I said, 'is it cancer?' And she said, 'Yes.'" Thus began her Second Life.
Surgery and Survival: The Aftermath
Her oncologist initially suggested replacing her bladder, but after a biopsy, plans changed to immediate major surgery. Emin lists calmly what followed: "I had this operation where they removed my bladder, half my vagina, my urethra, my ovaries, part of my intestines, my lymph nodes and a full hysterectomy." Twelve people worked in the operating theatre for seven-and-a-half hours.
Today, she remains almost shockingly calm and without self-pity. "I was really cool about it all the whole time. You've got a 70 per cent chance of dying, the chance of living is 30 per cent." Yet she combines dire desperation with unwavering determination.
She reflects on Traceyville's origins, created partly in response to a childhood where her valiant single mother couldn't provide a stable home after her father went bankrupt and disappeared. Her compulsive buying responds to the shame and pain of "not having"—explaining her many properties and possibly the high heating in her Margate house.
Art as Salvation: Painting Through Pain
The Tate exhibition pivots around her famous unmade Bed—a scene of decay, sex, lovelessness, and basic instinct. Stained sheets, used condoms, and sordid detritus illustrated her inner life turned outward through brutal exposure. It shocked and screamed, becoming a symbol for a generation upended and listless during the Thatcher years.
Only Emin could include an abortion room in her show. She has juggled life and death throughout her existence. "My cancer surgeon told me I wouldn't be here at Christmas. That was in June." She defied the odds and the ignominy of cancer. "I had my vagina sewed up with barbed wire stitches—pretty painful I can tell you." Then she grins, as if happy her trauma is now something she can relate to rather than experience.
"You're ecstatically happy to be alive, to survive, but then you have the reality of being a survivor, of having a disability, a hidden disability for which you get zero sympathy," she notes. "But importantly, I am much happier than I used to be. Also, I stopped drinking, which is a massive thing; it was something I had done all my life since age 13." The only other time she stopped was when broke—"which my dad said shows I wasn't an alcoholic!"
She points out that Munch and David Hockney also gave up drink, making artists more productive. "I don't paint at four o'clock in the morning after two bottles of wine, do I! Massive difference." But some habits persist: she always paints during a full moon. "I used to make jokes about this, but it really is true."
Creative Forces and Fearlessness
Emin believes external forces influence her creativity. "When you are painting, there is a force coming through you from a million miles back, 1,000 million miles back, and it comes through you if you're there at the right time and you have the right canvas in front of you."
She credits an outside force at work: "One thing I know is everything I paint isn't just down to me because I don't know what I am going to do." She describes starting with shapes in her head—"my cavewoman painting"—but never knowing the final image. A kitchen table drawing might become a blue landscape, then a figure, a house, overpainted white, revealing another figure resembling her mother, transforming into a self-portrait through a hallucinogenic process.
This fearlessness defines her approach. "My surgeon said to me, 'Are you not afraid of anything?' And I said no, not really and definitely not of death," she recalls. "He said, 'Why not?' I said death looks after itself, it's unavoidable. It's life we have to focus on." When he persisted, she admitted fearing only torture—"because they keep you alive." She concludes: "I am not afraid of death but also, to be clear, I don't want to die."
Early Struggles and Artistic Salvation
Drama marked her artistic beginnings. At the Royal College, poverty prevented storing pictures at home, unlike peers with parental garages. In a rage, she took a sledgehammer and destroyed her works in the art school courtyard. "I destroyed all the paintings that I did before I got into a college of art. I just smashed them all up. I had nowhere to put anything. I just had, like, nothing, nowhere."
This began her struggle to fit in as a young woman who left school at fifteen. "I was put on the pill by my mother aged 14. I also had a massive chip on my shoulder and didn't fit in," she says. Even Royal College forms asking for parental occupations had "no room for 'unemployed' and no room for nothing, nothing, nothing. There is only room for something, something, something."
Yet good humour saved her. "I never took drugs so I was able to buy a house as soon as I could when I started to sell work. In the end, art kept me alive. Art has always been there for me," she reflects. "When I was young, I was so nihilistic and so suicidal in my head, but whenever I took on the idea of suicide, something bizarre would happen and give me a high, and it would always be something artistic."
Legacy and Advocacy
Emin bubbles on, unstoppable and riveting. She passionately advocates for women facing attacks like hers, lightheartedly suggesting plaques mark where she and others were raped. She would fight "to the nth degree" for women's bodily autonomy.
The Tracey Emin of today is rich, loved, and wildly successful, supported by a team led by assistant and manager Harry Weller. She appreciates her comfort and security passionately, never forgetting she risked losing everything. Art and survival instinct always intervened. "She says if there was a plane crash and only one passenger was reported as having survived, she always knew it would be her."
She laughs, pauses, and acknowledges life's hardness despite her joy and triumphs. Cancer takes few prisoners, but she has survived brilliantly—always at a cost. That cost is now at the Tate, for all to see, admire, and wonder at.
