There is a long buildup before I get to see Tracey Emin – her two cats, Teacup and Pancake, preceding her like a pair of slinky sentries as she walks into the white-painted basement kitchen of her huge Georgian house in Margate. The lengthy overture is because – though I’ve been invited for noon – Emin is a magnificently late riser. Her average working day, her studio manager Harry tells me, runs from about 6pm to 3am. And so, while the artist is gradually sorting herself out, Harry takes me on a tour through her home town in the January drizzle, the sea a sulky grey blur beyond the sands.
At last, Harry is ringing the doorbell, and Emin’s lovely housekeeper, Sam, is sitting me down in the kitchen, then finally here she is, dressed in loose dark trousers and top, with those faithful cats. Emin is recognisably the same as she’s ever been – the artist who scandalised and entranced the nation in the 1990s with her tent embroidered with the names of everyone she’d ever slept with; with her unmade bed and its rumpled sheets and detritus. She still has that sardonic lip, those arched brows, those flashing eyes. But these days she is surprisingly calm, slow moving, her greying hair swept back into a loose bun. This is the Emin who has worked hard, survived a great deal and, somewhat unpredictably, ended up a national treasure.
She pours out cups of green tea – once, it would have been vodka and a fag, but there’s been no alcohol for nearly six years now, and she quit her 50-a-day habit a long while back. In the past few years, death almost claimed her and she clawed herself back to life again: in 2020, she was diagnosed with a vicious squamous cell cancer, requiring dramatic surgery. “I had to have my bladder removed. I had a full hysterectomy. I had my lymph nodes removed, I had half my vagina removed, I had my urethra removed, part of my bowel removed,” she says, ticking off the losses. She is contained, quiet-spoken, and there are none of the flashes of anger she was once famous for, though she’s exacting as we talk, correcting me if she thinks I’m on the wrong track. Seven hours and more, the operation took. She also had a urostomy – surgery to create a stoma (hole in the abdomen) so urine can pass out into a collection bag. She often has hers beside her in a tote bag.
Life without a bladder is “pretty heavy”, she tells me. Today, for example, when she got in the shower, she had a lot of bleeding from her stoma. Then there’s the whole business of the bag, which needs emptying into a loo maybe “every 15 to 20 minutes, or it might be OK for an hour. For a lot of people with urostomies, they don’t go to theatre, they don’t go to cinema,” she says. If you can’t get to a loo in time, it can overfill and burst, which isn’t great, especially if it happens in a public place. If she wants to do something as simple as take a nap at home, she says, even that’s tricky. “It wakes you up because of the pressure” and, worst case, “The bag will just fly off, and then all the urine will go everywhere. It’s 500ml of urine in a small bag, which doesn’t sound like much.” (It sounds like plenty, to me.)
She has bowel problems on top of everything else. “You’ve got the blood, you’ve got the shit, you’ve got the pills – it really can get you down, because you can’t be free. Nothing can be improvised. Nothing can be spontaneous. When I go away, half my suitcase is full of medical supplies.” She’s not moaning, she keeps telling me: she knows she’s lucky. But it’s hard work. She got really upset, she says, about what to wear for her investiture as a dame last year. She had her bag strapped to her leg, which was OK, but uncomfortable. “I didn’t want to do my photos with the king holding a bag of urine,” she says.
Then there are the infections – urinary tract one day “that can go to a full-blown kidney infection the next. And then, if I’m really unlucky, a blood infection.” She had sepsis in September, she says: “And it took me about three months to get well again.” She’s on antibiotics much of the time for one thing and another. She worries about getting a cold or flu – there are no friendly hugs and kisses any more. “And I get so fatigued.” She is clearly extremely vulnerable, physically. But she gleefully shows me her lifeline: “It’s pretty strong, and goes right round into infinity,” she says, tracing it as it disappears round her wrist. “I reckon that I was going to die and then they, whoever they are” – she glances heavenwards – “they said, ‘I don’t think she’s all bad. Let’s give her another go, see what she can do.’”
This is, then, her second life – and Second Life is also the title of her forthcoming show at Tate Modern, her largest to date. Her brush with death changed everything – it was the spur to relocate permanently to Margate, to set up a foundation, to put in place things that could give back to her home town and carry on after her eventual death. There are still houses in London and Provence – but Margate is home now. Aside from her roomy painting studio, on his tour Harry shows me the high-rise where Emin has bought flats for artists to live in at low rent; the art school she has created, where a second intake of students, nine of them, are working away; the artists’ studios she’s renting out at low cost; the building she’s going to convert into another 10; the former morgue that’s a training kitchen for long-term unemployed people; then there’s the derelict building along the coast that’s going to become a cafe and community bathing club. Hers is a philanthropic property empire. Harry also shows me the hideaway Emin used to go to at weekends, before she moved into the big house in December. With a flourish, he opens a door from the bedroom and a sizeable toplit indoor swimming pool is revealed, like Narnia from the back of a wardrobe. Later, Emin worries about me mentioning it, because she thinks Guardian readers won’t approve – though speaking for myself, I was more dazzled than disapproving.
The Tate Modern exhibition is going to be huge, ranging right across her 40-year career. But she’s not calling it a retrospective – not least because the first work in the exhibition is the spikily titled My Major Retrospective 1963-93, made when she was 30 for her first solo show, at White Cube gallery. It consisted of photographs of the paintings she had made at art school and then destroyed – one of the turbulent chapters of her relationship with the medium. Among the more recent works will be a series of photographs she has taken of her own post-operative body – the blood, the stoma, the reality of life in a battleworn female body – shown opposite photos of her body she took as a young woman. There will be her installation My Bed – her soiled sheets, the environs littered with bottles, fags, condoms, all the self-revealing fragments of a chaotic life – which caused an uproar when it was shown as part of her Turner prize exhibition in 1999.
Emin was a paradox – wildly successful, hugely famous, but also damned for her supposed self-absorption and narcissism. Looking back, some of this criticism looks plain sexist. A woman, especially a working-class woman, making art about her emotions and body was not seen as respectable, back then. Now, I think, the world has caught up with her. She tells me about what people made of one of her early films, Why I Never Became A Dancer (1995), which will be in the Tate exhibition. “At the time, people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s just Tracey prancing around.’ No! Listen to what I was saying,” she says vehemently, as if she’s slipped back 30 years and is confronting her critics. “See what the film’s about. Understand it.” The film tells a story of her adolescence – how she left school at 13, how she had a lot of sex with a lot of men in their 20s. And then, in 1978, at 15, she entered a disco championship. She was on the dancefloor, owning it, she was going to win – “And then they started: ‘SLAG, SLAG, SLAG.’” Most of the people taunting her were men she’d slept with. She ran out of the room in tears. But the film ends with her dancing – seizing joy from the men who tried to bring her down.
“We’re talking about grooming, we’re talking about bullying,” she says now. “And, of course, you know, the ‘Slag, slag, slag’ didn’t just happen on the dancefloor. It happened in the high street. I was raped when I was 13. Then after that, about six months later, I started having sex with all these people – because I wanted to be in control. But, of course, I wasn’t. It was terrible. When I see a 13- or 14-year-old girl now, I think, ‘Oh my God, imagine someone who’s 20 or 25 having sex with that person. What the fuck is wrong with them?’” Her refusal of shame reminds me of Gisèle Pelicot’s stance: “Shame must change sides.” I ask Emin how she manages not to care what people think of her. “What makes you think I don’t? I do care, immensely,” she says.
There are two rooms in the Tate Modern show devoted to works on abortion – Emin had two in the 1990s, the first almost killing her, after it turned out she had been pregnant with twins and one foetus was left inside her. It wouldn’t be easy to show such works in the US now, I suggest. Even though, for example, her film How It Feels (1996) doesn’t take a campaigning position, but simply does what the title implies. Emin tells me she has pulled a version of the Tate Modern show from the Guggenheim in New York, after the exhibition space available was, she says, reduced. “It was made impossible for me to do it because the space was getting smaller and smaller, and then it meant that my Tate show wouldn’t actually fit.” It would be a question of making the show smaller – but then, she says, “What work would they take out? The abortion work?” Was that what was discussed? “I don’t know,” she admits. “I just know I’m not doing a show there any more.” (The Guggenheim was approached for comment.) “If I have a show in New York,” she says, “it’s got to be exactly as I want it to be.”
There’s an account in her book, Strangeland, published in 2005, of her rape when she was 13 – she was pushed into an alley by a man while walking home after a New Year’s Eve party. When she got home, her mum dusted her off and no more was said. It was kind of ordinary: the girls she knew used the phrases “broken in” or “broken into” when they’d been forced to have sex for the first time. When I express horror at how commonplace sexual violence seems to have been, how surely things have changed for the better, Emin laughs at my naivety. “It’s happening all the time. It’s happening around the corner … Right now, somewhere, not very far away, someone is either being beaten, locked in a cupboard, being raped, being abused, being coerced into something they don’t want to do.”
And then, of course, there are the myriad ways in which being a young girl in the age of social media is even worse than it was in the 1970s. Her take on misogynist horrors such as Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok, which had been used to digitally “undress” and otherwise humiliate real women and girls, is, she says, “luddite”. “I keep telling young people: keep a diary, get a camera, learn to print your own photos. Don’t put it all in your phone, because everything in your phone belongs to someone else. And if you want to write a secret to someone, send a letter. There’s nothing wrong in slowing down and stepping everything back.” Taking your time, that’s what’s important, she says. It’s like looking at a painting. You have to do it slowly. “Art is to me, now, probably one of the last good things we’ve got left as human beings. And it was the same in the caves in Palaeolithic times.
“There’s something about making something from ourselves which is beautiful and otherworldly as well. And we need all of those things right now to remind us that we can be good-spirited, that we don’t have to make corruption, we don’t have to make greed, we don’t have to make power,” she says. “Making a beautiful painting isn’t about making power. It’s empowering yourself to feel something, and then if you’ve done it correctly, other people look at it and feel something, too.”
Emin had a turbulent childhood. Her Turkish-Cypriot father, Enver, had another family and was only around a few days a week. Then his hotel business collapsed and he abandoned Emin, her mum and twin brother Paul, plunging them into poverty. I wonder how, despite all that, she has such a positive relationship with Margate now. It was actually her mum’s death, in 2016, that was the first turning point, she says: it was then she decided she wanted to continue to have a connection with the place. And now, “even though my mum’s not here, I sort of feel she’d be really so happy to see what I’ve done. She was worried I’d gone up my own arse and become a bit of a twat, which I had at some points. I’m just trying to recalibrate what’s important in life. Art is the most important thing to me – and I know other things are more important to other people, but it’s art for me. So now I just live art, work art, do art, facilitate other people to do art … There’s a sense of peace. I’ve gone full circle in my life. I’ve come home. That is one of the nicest feelings in the world.”
Margate has some of the highest rates of child poverty in the country. Emin tells me proudly about how art and culture are making a difference to the struggling local economy. There’s the huge success of the major gallery in the town, Turner Contemporary, and she’s involved in a pop-up arts festival that took place a few weekends ago, called Off Season, which gets shops and restaurants buzzing in the dead of winter. But Kent county council is now run by Reform. In August, union flags went up overnight in the town, as they did around a lot of the country, part of a campaign linked to the far right. “I wanted to hire a cherrypicker and cut them down,” Emin says. “And then we realised that probably, if I tried to get a cherrypicker, it could be the same cherrypicker they hired to put them up.
“I like to reclaim things,” she adds. “Like during Cool Britannia [in the late 1990s], the flag was used as a positive thing for everyone.” When Emin had a big show in 2011 at the Hayward Gallery in London, there was a billboard poster for it showing her running down the street naked, trailing a union flag. “I got a phone call from what would have been Ukip at the time and they said, ‘We’ve noticed your poster holding the union flag – you’re a woman from our hearts, and we’d really like to meet up with you.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, obviously you didn’t notice how brown my arse is, did you?’ And I just put the phone down.” She adds, “My dad came here in 1948 from Cyprus, and he’s really dark skinned. My great-grandfather was from Nubia [modern Sudan]. My mother’s family were Gypsies. So as far as I’m concerned, I’m the most amazing British person you can have.”
She’s voted Labour all her life, she says – apart from twice for David Cameron’s Tories, in 2010 and 2015. (“Well it wasn’t that I was voting Tory,” she clarifies, “it was that I was voting for certain ministers that were supporting the arts” – though culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and arts minister Ed Vaizey failed to prevent huge cuts to the arts imposed by then chancellor George Osborne as part of his “austerity” measures.)
The current political tone on immigration appals her – and she loathes Reform with a passion. “If the far right get in in this country, we are doomed. And everybody has to understand the significance of it. When friends say they’re not voting Labour because of what’s happened in the last two years, I say, ‘Then vote Tory, vote anything, vote Green, but don’t let Reform get in.’” She adds, “The immigration from asylum seekers in this country is minuscule, minor. Britain could take care of people wanting to come here, people could be processed and people could be working … Instead, we’ve got a country now that’s bordering on neo-Nazi rhetoric, which I find really abhorrent.”
We speculate for a moment on what a potential Reform government might bring the arts. “Art institutions may not survive, but art will always survive. If you had Farage pushing down all the arts, saying things were degenerate, getting rid of it all, like Trump is doing now, you will have this bubble, bubble” – her voice rises like something out of Macbeth – “bubble of all the arts, that you will never be able to stop, ever. And they will rise up like the biggest fucking volcano these people have ever seen.”
For Emin, the solution to poverty and lack of opportunity is always education – despite her own schooldays not being a success. She didn’t get on with academic work, and stopped going to school at 13. “My mum wasn’t around. She left home for quite a while. My nan would come sometimes. People would drift in and out.” She defends her mum fiercely. “It wasn’t my mum’s fault. Out of choice, she wouldn’t have left us – end of story.” At one point, Emin was caught stealing from Woolworths: “Really badly caught shoplifting. I got caught for nicking a pair of navy blue socks.” They were school socks, of course. “What the school should have done at that point was said, ‘Why is she stealing school uniform? What is going on?’ But people didn’t notice things like that, back then.”
When she was 15, she was effectively forced back to school by social services a couple of days a week, where she mostly sat in the art room, drawing. There, for the first time, she was encouraged, mentored – and she flourished. By sheer force of will, she got herself into art school despite not having O-levels or A-levels, battling people’s low expectations of her all the way. “It took me a long time to get to the Royal College of Art, but I did it. And now, you can’t go to art school unless you’re loaded.”
I wonder if she has any regrets. As one childless woman to another, for example, does she regret not having kids? “I’m really, really, really happy about not having children,” she says. “You know how people are really happy because they have children? I’m really happy because I don’t. And I’ve got lots of young people around me as well, which is really good, people who are creative. And I have really made my life as full as possible, behaving and doing things that someone with children couldn’t do.”
What are her regrets then? “Number one: smoking. Number two” – she suddenly starts giggling – “taking it up the wrong hole.” Tracey, do you mean anal sex? We’re both cracking up now. “I mean that metaphorically as well … although I don’t even regret it because some of it was quite good.” She pulls herself together. “What I mean is a sensibility about understanding what I wanted and what my needs were. I should have taken much better care of myself, but I let myself get blown around, and that was silly.” Most of all, though, she says she regrets what she calls “the B-list years” – the mid-2000s for a goodish half-decade or so “when you look back and think, ‘God, was that the shallowest level of myself that I could ever be?’” Too much partying; not enough time devoted to the thing at the centre of her life: art.
That was after she split up with her then partner, artist Mat Collishaw. Is she seeing anyone now, I wonder? “No, not really, no,” she says, slightly evasively. In her life she has dated men and women. “No, I’m not. I was having a relationship with someone for a while, but not a conventional relationship, and I had an affair for a long time with someone who I really was deeply in love with, and I still love. I’m still loving, I still love, and to love, really, is … is human. And I think to live without love is probably one of the saddest things for the self, for the heart, so I don’t want to live without love ever again. I’m quite happy now with unrequited love, as long as I can love – and I have my cats.”
She’s absolutely certain, though, of one thing. “I don’t ever again in my life want someone saying, ‘What time you coming home? Where are we going on holiday? What we eating tonight? Did you eat the chocolate? No, it’s your turn.’ Never, ever – mind you, I never really had it, because it wasn’t like that with me … ” A certain self-containment, an ability to live her life as she wishes to live it, is what’s important now. “I like my sovereignty,” she says.
Everything, now, is about the art. If the cancer, the touch of death, did one thing, it was to clarify utterly who she is and what she exists for. Painting is at the centre of her creative world these days. There are many canvases on the go in her studio, some she’s working on actively, some that might sit there for a few years until she turns to them again. She often paints over things she’s done – which are frequently, but not always, female figures a bit like herself, or couples or, at times, her mother – allowing one set of painted gestures to suggest the next, sometimes completely transforming the image along the way. Harry tells me that when they are in the studio together, “she talks about what she sees in the canvas, and then starts painting it in”.
I ask her if she can describe what that feels like. “There’s the canvas, there’s me, and there’s this other space between us, and you have to go through it, that space, and you drag in everything behind you with you into it. It’s like going through a weird tunnel. And the painting is whatever you’ve dragged through the tunnel with you,” she says. “There are many ways to be a painter – art has many rooms. But for me it’s like an explosion of sorts. It’s like my heart being ripped open and then throwing it all on to the canvas.”
She’s lit up when she says this. This is what she’s on this Earth for. It suddenly dawns on me: she’s happy – or at least happier than she has ever been. “Yes,” she says. “Even when I’m unhappy, I’m not as unhappy as I used to be. I do what I want to do. If I feel like painting, I’ll go and paint. If I don’t feel like painting, I’ll go and teach. If I don’t feel like teaching, I’ll go and take a walk on the beach. If I don’t want to walk on the beach, I cuddle my cats.” After the cancer, she says, “The big thing that I discovered was that I don’t want to die right now. You might think that’s obvious, but it’s not. I have spent a lot of my life being sad, being nihilistic and punishing myself mentally – and drinking and smoking. And then I realised: I could have my time back again.”
Tracey Emin: A Second Life is at Tate Modern, 27 February-31 August. The Guardian is partnering with Tate to offer readers 2-for-1 tickets. Use the code GUARDIAN241 on the Tate website to redeem.
My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting by Martin Gayford is published by Thames & Hudson on 26 February at £25. To order a copy for £20, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
