The new exhibition devoted to the work of the British artist Tracey Emin, currently at Tate Modern in London, is her biggest yet, with over ninety works on view, and the first since her recovery from major surgery for bladder cancer in 2020. In a series of winning interviews, she has talked openly about the impact of being given six months to live, her life-changing surgery (she now has a stoma and uses a urostomy bag), her recovery, and her entry into what she gladly calls her “second chance,” her “second life.” When she was made a dame commander of the British Empire in 2024 she had just received the four-year all-clear from her oncology team, and she said the news made her feel “like being born again.” Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see, she laughs, just how much she is “thoroughly enjoying the second part.”

And why not? Once renowned for being drunk during a TV interview and walking off set, disparaged for her “narcissism,” and vilified by the conservative press for her scandalous Turner Prize entry, My Bed (1998)—an installation of her actual bed—she is now an artist whose work sits at the very center of the British art establishment. Everyone knows Emin. She is not only a CBE and a dame; she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and became a Royal Academician the same year. In 2011 she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy, and in 2023 a Trustee of the British Museum. She heads her own art institution, providing subsidized studio spaces and residencies funded by the Tracey Emin Foundation. Every major media outlet in the country has interviewed her, exploring her views not only about painting and the politics of making art in Britain but about education, wealth, immigration, austerity, the health of our rivers, the toxic policies of Reform, the dangerous rise of right-wing, xenophobic rhetoric, and the ubiquity of violence against women and girls.

A second life needs a first, and although not billed as a retrospective, the exhibition charts a chronological route through her work. Curated by Maria Balshaw (her last show as director of the Tate) alongside Alvin Li and Jessica Baxter, and with considerable input from Emin herself and her creative director, Harry Weller, it tells a story of transcendence. Weller is explicit about this:

I wanted to show where Tracey’s been, her heritage, where she’s come from, the fact that she transcends trauma, whether that’s sexual abuse, or abortion, and surgery, of course. I also wanted to showcase that she’s a serious painter. She is up there with the big boys, and those men, and those expressionist painters as well…. She competes with them.

So we begin at the beginning, with where she’s come from: a quilted blanket stitching the story of her parents’ relationship and her birth, with her twin brother, Paul, in July 1963 in Mayday Hospital in Croydon; a mini autobiography scrawled on numbered sheets of notepaper (spelling mistakes and crossings out included); a wooden rollercoaster entitled It’s Not the Way I Want to Die that evokes the Scenic Railway, a 1920s ride at the Dreamland funfair in the seaside town of Margate, Kent, where Emin grew up. There might be other ways of telling the story of her origins, by focusing on her teachers, friends, and collaborators. Emin stopped attending school at the age of thirteen, but in England in the 1970s you weren’t allowed to disappear from the school roll until the summer you turned sixteen, and as Emin explains, she was required by social services to attend at least three days a week.

Two of those she spent in the art room and on the third she took English, math, and PE. She got the education she needed, carved out of the one that was required by the state, and later went on to study fashion at the Medway College of Design and printmaking at Maidstone Art College (both now part of the University of the Creative Arts), then got an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. Where she came from might also include her friendships with some of the Young British Artists in the early 1990s, especially Mat Collishaw and Sarah Lucas (with whom Emin ran a shop selling mostly their own work in East London in 1993), and the financial patronage of Charles Saatchi. Shorn of these institutional networks, the exhibition tends to suggest an artist born of her own entrails—though that is also true.

In the second room of the show you encounter a bottleneck, as visitors crowd into the relatively small space to watch the six-minute video installation Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995). Made when Emin was thirty-two, the short film is shot like a 1970s home movie on Super 8, and it tells a story of Emin’s adolescence in Margate. The British seaside looms large in the nation’s cultural consciousness, and many of our images seem stuck in the 1950s—sticks of rock candy, men with hankies knotted on their bald heads, sunburn, the tacky red and yellow of buckets and spades. Margate was the site of some of England’s first amusement parks, and Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland (1953), one of the first Free Cinema documentaries, featured the penny slot machines in the arcade, the cups of tea, the vacant looks of adults and children “enjoying” their free time. The odd thing about the photographer Tony Ray-Jones’s images of Margate from the 1960s and Martin Parr’s from the 1980s is that they seem interchangeable: it’s as though once the English get onto the sand, we become timeless.

Emin manages to sidestep all that in her film, which is, almost uniquely in portraits of the English seaside in summer, absent of people. We see—through grainy footage seemingly held in a shaky hand—the empty beach, the amusement arcade, the high street, the lido, in a washed-out light. It’s all recognizable, just one step away from the cliché, and yet strangely alien. Emin’s voice-over—simple, direct, unfussy—describes the world of her childhood in the late 1970s: thirteen-going-on-fourteen-year-old Tracey, who has stopped going to school and exults in a summer in which there’s “nothing to do but dream,” go to the pub, eat fish and chips, and have sex. Sex was “something simple,” “it was something you could just do, and it was for free.”

I’ve always loved this film for the way it brings the viewer inside the head of the girl in Margate in 1977, and of the grown-up woman looking back, without compromising either of them. Emin recalls the “power” sex gave her, the sense of adventure and “learning,” when it was good: “There were no morals or rules or judgments, I just did what I wanted to do.” She describes the degradation when sex was bad, and grown-up Emin wonders about the young men, aged nineteen, or twenty-five, who wanted to have sex with a child. Soon enough she finds another source of power: “By the time I was fifteen I’d stopped shagging, but I was still flesh and I thought with my body. But now it was different, now it was me and dancing.”

She goes on to describe entering a competition in the summer of 1978. It was a heat in the national disco dance championships, and it was going to be her route out of Margate, until the men she had had sex with started calling out “slag,” and her confidence faltered. But this isn’t a story about shaming. Instead, that moment gave her direction: “I thought I’m leaving this place. I’m getting out of here. I’m better than all of them, I’m free. And I left Margate. And I left those boys. Shane, Eddie, Doug, Tony, Richard—this one’s for you,” she says, and the sound of Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” which reached number eight in the UK in 1978, replaces her voice while the film is still skimming over Margate scenes, before cutting to Emin herself for the first time, dancing alone. Why I Never Became a Dancer could have been titled How I Became an Artist, and the single word that would summarize it is “conviction.”

Getting the script right is central to Emin’s work. She makes artworks into documents of the past, and turns manuscripts into pictures by putting them on the wall; she writes across her paintings, and sews insults (“Mad Tracey from Margate”), epigrams, messages, love tokens, and snatches of overheard speech onto quilts, blankets, and even her grandmother’s chair. Perhaps the most famous example is the tent appliquéd with the names of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, which included her mother and her twin brother. That work was a companion piece to Why I Never Became a Dancer, made the same year, and like the film focused on putting names to sex and intimacy—making it real. The tent isn’t included in “A Second Life” because it was destroyed in a fire at Momart’s East London warehouse in 2004.

But there is plenty of writing in the exhibition nonetheless: letters and anecdotes written out by hand and framed alongside photographs, an old passport, a removed tooth; neon signs flourishing “hand-written” epigrams; the scripted yet somehow still “unmade” and provisional video installations; instructions sewn onto huge collaged blankets, such as The Last of the Gold (2002), an A to Z of directions for what to do if you are thinking about having an abortion:

INSIST on Having an Abortion as SOON As possible—IF you have The money (300 pound) you can be treated within 24 hours—IF you go through the NHS You may have to wait up too SIX weeks depending on availability And Then They MAY Say NO… If you do decide you want to have the baby, don’t listen to anyone, just listen to your heart.

I came across a second bottleneck in front of the twenty-three-minute video How It Feels (1996), a painfully fraught account of Emin’s experience of an abortion in 1990 (unknowingly she was pregnant with twins, and one of the fetuses was retained in her uterus for more than a week). Emin stands in front of the office where a doctor tried to persuade her that she’d make a good mother, and the clinic where she eventually had the botched procedure, expressing her anger at the men who refused to listen to her and her own terrifyingly mixed feelings in the aftermath. That crisis is everywhere on show in the exhibition—in My Major Retrospective II 1982–1992 (2008), a series of 180 tiny photographs stitched onto fabric, representing the work she destroyed following the “emotional suicide” of her abortion; in the mock-up of a performance in Stockholm in 1996, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, in which for three weeks Emin locked herself naked inside a room furnished with only canvases and acrylic paint, in order to overcome five years’ aversion to painting following her abortions (third bottleneck); in the many drawings and paintings of splayed legs, bellies, and dripping blood.

How It Feels is a portrait of pain and confusion, and it’s no wonder that the UK anti-abortion organization Right to Life quotes passages from it in their propaganda, especially Emin’s admission that she was “wracked with guilt” following the procedure, but not the part where she insists that, even so, she made the right choice. It took me several visits before I could watch the film all the way through, although I’m not in the least bit squeamish. I was puzzled by my reaction, and rather ashamed of it. Perhaps it was too close for comfort. I’m nine months older than Tracey Emin; we were both born in Croydon; we were in the same grade; we might have met, if Emin’s family hadn’t moved to Margate; and we both got pregnant in our mid-twenties when we were unemployed and effectively single. Emin has said that she hoped her film might be “useful” to others, and perhaps I didn’t want her speaking for me.

“My art is a place where people can expose themselves by looking at it, and they can feel their own feelings and their own emotions,” she told the BBC in 2024. Perhaps that is exactly what was happening. I was feeling my own feelings and wanted to hold hers at bay. But I think my discomfort had as much to do with Emin’s refusal, or inability, to overcome her own ambivalence. She thinks with her body and names the abortion as it was, and still is: a catastrophe, a “mistake,” but a necessary one. There is no coming to terms with the experience. Her methods of dealing with her personal history look similar to psychotherapeutic reckoning: memory, naming, truth telling, repetition, narration, explanation. She has even suggested recently that tackling taboo subjects like rape, abortion, and teenage sex abuse in her art is “healthy.” But the works themselves are antitherapeutic. They don’t learn anything, and instead keep us inside the mess of experience.

The biggest mess is the mess of Emin’s most famous artwork, My Bed, with its stained mattress, soiled sheets, bloody underwear, used condoms, cigarette packets, pregnancy tests, and bottles of vodka. Beds are a staple of Emin’s art. She gives a wonderfully technical answer when asked why there are so many beds in her paintings, explaining that the angled line acts as an anchor to the rest of the image, allowing all sorts of forms to emerge: “I can make anything work from that line in the painting, anything I want…it’s just a device.” The beds in the pictures are always peopled, with female bodies reclining, splayed, or skewered, sometimes dying, sometimes in ecstasy, and sometimes not alone. But like the voice-over section of Dancer, and like the appliquéd quilts or the empty tent, there’s no body in My Bed, and it’s all the more haunting for that. It is a portrait of abjection—Emin has said that when she got out of the bed after a period of depression she was disgusted by what she saw—but also of self-protection. The bed had seen her through her breakdown.

My Bed is disturbing in the same way as Dancer and How It Feels. These are all works that refuse to offer a perspective outside of emotional and bodily confusion. What they ask from the viewer is recognition and, as I found in my aversion to How It Feels, it’s not always easy to give. When critics discuss My Bed aesthetically (comparing it to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 bed, for example), it seems less true to the experience of seeing the work than the tabloid outrage that followed its first exhibition. Something revolting was being put on display and exulted in. But seeing the installation in this show nearly thirty years after its first outing, Emin told the BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg that the bed looked “tiny, and sad,” and that she cried on encountering it again. Recalling other settings where the bed gave off an aura of “rumpy-pumpy” and “fecundity,” she suggested that having come through an encounter with death, what speaks to her now is the “time capsule” of her life and, she implies, the forlorn vulnerability of her younger self.

The tears aren’t only Emin’s. I’ve spoken to several people who came out of the exhibition weeping uncontrollably. It’s as though Emin’s own recent work were teaching the earlier pieces a lesson: you thought there was power, but there was only suffering. Emin’s rebirth into her second life is staged as a movement from shadow into light. Visitors progress through a darkened corridor, which I imagine is intended to echo the birth canal, lined with iPhone photographs charting the wounding and healing of her post-operative body, and the stoma to which she attaches her urostomy bag. Having passed through that corridor several times, I would say that most people couldn’t really bear to look.

And then the renaissance. You emerge from the corridor into a gallery hung with huge painted canvases: bodies, beds, landscapes, and crosses leaking crimson, against seas of blue, whites, and creams and brooding figures in black. Emin has described herself as a “thin painter,” and the brushstrokes, washes, drips, and overpainting are all on display in these canvases. None of the stages of the artwork is hidden. Emin likens painting to going to visit a fortune teller. She makes no preparatory sketches: “I want a painting to tell me something that I didn’t know before, not something I already know.” She’ll apply paint and then wait for the subject of the painting to reveal itself, turning canvases upside down, painting out figures, and adding patterns, giving herself over to the serendipity of the physical process. “It’s just about paint,” she says. “It’s just me, moving through the canvas, and moving through the ideas.” There’s a wild energy and pleasure of discovery on display in the best of these paintings, though I don’t find they ask much of the viewer. The meanings of those bodies and the crosses they bear are perhaps overdetermined. I admire them (more than the bronzes of female nudes, some tiny, some oversized, that occupy the same gallery and appear inert in comparison), but I don’t feel the catharsis that, I am sure, went into their creation. To be bothered about this, to complain that the paintings have lost some of the emotional challenge of the earlier installations, would be like asking Emin to carry on being confused and unhappy.

It is striking that by this point in the exhibition, script has almost disappeared, barring a few neon signs. But the narratives and explanations have not been excised completely; they have simply moved elsewhere, into the many, many interviews that Emin gives to accompany her exhibitions. The interviews now carry the storytelling that so often gives authority to the work. They are part of the work itself, as a throwaway remark by Weller makes clear. After Emin’s mother died in 2016, “she took a year off,” he explains, “and just did no interviews, and just focused on painting and upscaling the bronzes.” Which is not perhaps how most artists would classify time off.

“A Second Life” is not a retrospective of the artist’s work, despite the fact that it traces a movement from her earliest to her most recent practice. There is too much that is missing for that. I regret the absence of Emin’s bird drawings in particular, and the tiny life-size (antimonumental) bird sculptures installed on tall poles or on rooftops in various locations worldwide. (Although admittedly the bronze birds need to be encountered outside, alongside real birds.) There’s a tenderness and a fragility to these works that speak quietly, and without sentimentality, of our relationship to nature, echoing the broken lyricism of a poet like John Clare, rather than the authority of the storyteller.

The Tate show chooses story. It is best understood as a carefully staged journey from trauma to transcendence: the deliberately narrow choice of examples of bodily pain from the early work, the dark blue walls, the low lighting, the many interviews focusing on trauma and rebirth are all part of the experience. It’s a journey that makes explicit at every turn the costs of living inside a female body. A recurring subject in the recent interviews is survival—not only her personal survival from cancer, but the survival of her body of work. As Emin points out, she has been exploring rape, abortion, and the sexual abuse of girls for decades, and for much of that time she was met with condescension and misogyny: Mad Tracey from Margate. But over the course of her career those subjects have only become more relevant and more urgent. The bed has become a platform, and Emin is determined to use her status as the new darling of the establishment to keep on saying what she has always said. She refuses to rest up: “Anybody that thought I was ranting on about abortion, thirty years ago—look what’s happening now.” And in another recent interview: “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.” We’ve been given a second chance, and we would do well to listen.