Tracey Emin: Mighty Real

By Sammi Gale

‘People might say that you have exploited being Tracey Emin,’ John Humphrys said in a 2001 interview. ‘But I am Tracey Emin,’ the artist replied. 

Twenty five years on, Humphrys sounds naive if not absurd. After all, he’s speaking to the artist whose most intimate diary notes are writ large in neon, who turned her unmade bed surrounded by condoms, blood-stained underwear, vodka bottles and cigarettes into an installation. It is hard to imagine Emin’s confessional mode raising his hackles in the same way today. 

We now live amid constant self-documentation. Influencer economies that monetise authenticity. Therapeutic discourse as everyday language. The autofictional literature of writers such as Vigdis Hjorth and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Fleabag’s looks to camera. Pointedly positioned not as a retrospective but A Second Life, Tate Modern’s exhibition invites viewers to see Emin anew. She seems the same through and through. But the world has caught up.

"the world has caught up"

Emin rose to prominence in the 1990s, within the ecology of the YBAs, a scene that was brash, industrial and media-savvy. Shock was aesthetic currency. You’d have thought the feminist performance art of the 1970s might have raised the floor of British prudishness. It didn’t. Emin repositioned confession at a moment when culture was renegotiating shame, celebrity, and authenticity. While, for instance, television programmes like The Jerry Springer show and The Oprah Winfrey Show were built around disclosure — strangers confessing infidelity, trauma, addiction — and packaging up humiliation as a circus, the tabloids treated Emin’s Turner Prize-shortlisted My Bed (1998) installation as a moral crime scene. Then, making art about sex was scandalous. In 2026, such oversharing is just another Tuesday. 

Although Emin’s name is synonymous with confessional art, the idea that mining the self is an invention of the 1990s collapses under basic scrutiny. Augustine of Hippo’s 4th-century Confessions established the trend of interior narration as revelation. The penitential imagery of medieval devotional art visualised sin, guilt, and redemption, while Renaissance portraiture went on to foreground the individual psyche. The flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel is often read as a self-portrait of Michelangelo – the sacred as a scaffold for his personal angst. Confession, in other words, has long been one of the engines of Western art.

Centuries before Emin, Michelangelo was treading the same tightrope between private abjection and public spectacle, only she walks the other way: her personal torment feels like a vehicle for something bigger. The Tate exhibition begins with an ‘In the beginning’, narrating the night of her conception, both on written pages and on a large tapestry-like appliquéd quilt. Why I never became a dancer (1995) is playing in the next room. Over crackling Super 8 footage of Margate’s beach and amusement arcades, the artist tells the story of troubling sexual encounters in a matter-of-fact tone: ‘The reason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of fourteen, was because they weren’t men. They were less, less than human’. Her teenage self sees the British Dancing Championship as her ticket out of town, but as she dances a group of boys chants 'Slag, Slag, Slag'. 

"her personal torment feels like a vehicle for something bigger."

The video follows the same pattern of conviction, humiliation and illumination as American Puritan conversion narratives, but instead of God the religion she finds is the cult of creative expression. At the video’s climax, the artist dances to Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’, a disco anthem out of San Francisco, celebrating sexual liberation. But despite this, and despite all the sex described, the artist’s breaking of the fourth wall – now she is dancing to camera –  makes Sylvester’s  ‘you’ sound like us, the gallery audience — and by extension, art itself. 

From the ritual of dance to Exploration of the Soul (1994), there is the feeling of a frenzy or a trance. Emin’s written words seem to arrive at the speed of someone cornering you at a party at 3am — breathless, unfiltered, complete with crossings-out and uncorrections. Letters with vertical strokes (l, h, t, g, y) stretch dramatically above and below the line, creating a rhythmic vertical energy across the page, almost like a musical score. Her paintings are marked by a soft, scattered line and sometimes include drips, making them seem dashed off in the heat of the moment. 

"It is difficult to say whether some works have been composed or released"

In How it Feels (1996), Emin recounts the physical and psychological dimensions of a complicated abortion six years prior. She speaks fast and as she narrates it’s as if she is talking herself back in time before us, recalling stray details like the lime green ankle socks she was wearing, a taxi driver waffling  on about the one-way system in the middle of her medical emergency. There is a Dionysian sense of social taboos loosening, hierarchies and boundaries collapsing through the sheer rush of expression. It is difficult to say whether some works have been composed or released, or if there even is a difference.

The sense of detachment from the artist’s own body and life described in How it Feels is depicted in I watched Myself die and come alive (2023), in which a shrouded figure looks over a woman reclined on a bed. The black figure on one side of the image is counterbalanced by a detailed patterned rug evoking Emin’s Turkish Cypriot heritage: left to right, where she came from; where she nearly went. The painting was made after Emin’s near-fatal illness in 2020, when she underwent surgery that left her with a permanent stoma. Photographs of her body ‘Before’ and ‘After’ the surgery line opposite walls of a corridor, the gallery’s architecture forcing the viewer to walk the knife-edge between life and near-death.

At the end of the passageway sits My Bed,  reading almost like a shrine.  A sculpture of a female body, raised to a height that recalls a crucifix in a church, hangs opposite.  It’s a motif Emin returns to often, including last year at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; she is said to paint the Crucifixion every Easter. At the Tate, Emin’s The Crucifixion (2022) hangs among a row of paintings,  nude female bodies at a similar scale, as if trying to blend in with them. The juxtaposition recalls Albrecht Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait where the artist presents himself frontal, Christ-like; at the time, using theology for self-fashioning verged on blasphemy as well as religious ecstasy. Likewise, Emin’s depictions of wounds, stomas, abortion and blood recall the devotional gore of countless martyrdoms or the Stations of the Cross. Certainly, as in Christian imagery, a recurring theme of Emin’s is the vulnerability of the flesh.

"a recurring theme of Emin’s is the vulnerability of the flesh."

Wall text describes a work called Death Mask (2002) as a ‘fulcrum’, and indeed the room is curated as such, the sculpture in its centre like a pivot. Historically, death masks were overwhelmingly made of notable men, so there is a sense of feminist reclamation in Emin’s of her own face –  also, a nod to Ancient Egypt, where Pyramids weren’t simply mausoleums but vehicles for passage into a second life.

Cats appear throughout Emin’s work. In Egyptian mythology, the animals were guardians between worlds; in popular superstition today, they get nine lives. Humans, unfortunately, get one. Emin made the Death Mask when she was thirty-nine, a year after the Humphrys interview, long before her cancer diagnosis. Seen now, it feels less like ironic morbidity than rehearsal, an artist staging the terms of her own disappearance.

In a world of algorithmic self-display, Emin’s work regains gravity. It reminds us that confession once involved risk – stigma. Many commentators in the 90s seemed to regard Emin as a hard-partying ladette. From the vantage point of influencer culture, it looks like she has exploited being Tracey Emin very effectively, thank you very much. But then as now, this is a lazy read; zoom out and Emin’s work deals with nothing ‘new’ at all, yet in that all-too-human eternality lies its greatest strength.  She puts herself forward entirely, in all her ambiguities and contradictions. Like St Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: ‘I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do.’ I have the desire to step outside Tracey Emin, but I am Tracey Emin, her work seems to say. And Emin is nothing if not devoted.