Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “I have no ideas,” Tracey Emin says, a little sharply. Talking to her in a calm office in south London, I have made the mistake of asking about the evolution of the “ideas” for the vibrant new paintings in I followed you to the end at White Cube Bermondsey. “Really, I don’t,” she goes on. “That’s not how it works.” So how does it work? “Here’s what happens,” she says. “I go in, and I paint red all over the canvas. Then I paint the bed on it. Then I paint the people on the bed. Then I don’t like them so I paint them out. Then I paint blue all over it. Then I don’t like it so I turn it upside down. Then I think, ‘Wow that really looks like a house’, so I paint the house on it. Then I think, ‘That’s really stupid’, so I get rid of the house, and I think, ‘Oh, it looks like a bed again’, so I paint two people on the bed and then I get rid of one person so there’s only one person left . . . It goes on and on like that. I never know what I’m going to paint until I’m painting.” Since emerging in the late 1990s as part of the Young British Artists group, Emin, 61, has created a particular form of autobiographical art in installations, drawings, paintings, sculpture, videos, neons. Time and again she nakedly reveals her pain, her vulnerability, her desire for love. Usually, it all centres around a bed — with echoes of what is still probably her most famous piece, “My Bed”, the installation of an unmade bed and surrounding detritus shown at Tate as a contender for the 1999 Turner Prize. To this day, dishevelled beds take centre stage in the majority of her paintings in a range of guises: a rack of pain, a place redolent of angry sex and troubled dreams, the locus (increasingly, now) of age, agony and death. Here lies a body bleeding after abortion or miscarriage, or suffering miseries of abandonment and regret. Here’s another: legs splayed, ripped genitals vulnerably agape. There is seldom even fleeting happiness, but at times (when the canvas has been inverted, flipping downward runnels of paint to point skywards) the bed seems like a magic carpet, soothing, floating, rising, perhaps adrift on waves. “Some of them look like it’s just a drawing with some colour on it, but it’s not, because underneath that there’s maybe a completely different painting with layers and layers. It might have painting on it that I did two years ago.”Does she remember what the layers contain? Does she photograph a work as she goes along? “I don’t remember, but Harry does. Though sometimes we fight about it.” Her overpainting technique often occludes memories of loss, trauma and abuse, the life-spring of these worksHarry Weller plays a special role in Emin’s working life: he is confidant and right-hand man and, unusually, is always at her side when she is painting. In the 2000s, at the height of her early success, she had a big office and studio and a team of staff. “It nearly fucking killed me,” she says. “Now Harry is the only person in my studio. We drink sparkling tea” — she gave up alcohol more than four years ago — “and I paint and we talk, sometimes until 2am. Then I go home and sleep for two days.” In 2020, Emin was diagnosed with a highly aggressive cancer and underwent what she describes as “last chance saloon” surgery that removed her womb, her bladder and part of her vagina and intestine; her survival was precarious. She nearly died again last year, she tells me, when she suffered a severe bowel blockage while travelling in Thailand. Small wonder that there is darkness in those bed-bound figures.Since the surgery, she has lived with a stoma that now features in almost every depiction of her body. “It’s something I have to accept,” she says, “to carry on living. But unless you’ve got one, or are close to someone who has one, you have no fucking idea. It’s like living with an egg — one that’s attached to the side of your body, that you have to be aware of and take care of.” She proceeds to share details, as matter-of-factly as if we were discussing a bus timetable. For this most body-conscious of artists, though, blood and gore can’t help but assume a metaphorical reality. Her stoma is the subject of a four-minute film: frank, unsensational but profoundly unsettling. At first sight, the neat red cherry of the stoma’s outlet, against the creamy skin of her stomach and the slight swell of her breast, is almost pretty: a rosebud extra nipple. Then, almost immediately, it seems shockingly intimate: a channel deep into her guts, a profound physical wound that mirrors the emotional and psychological wounds that she lays bare in her work. Those emotional narratives — memories of childhood trauma, abuse, rape, loss and more, the life-spring of these works — are often cloudy, occluded, because of the overpainting techniques. Half-scrubbed-out ghostly figures hover over the beds — her recently deceased mother; a departed lover — like bad dreams fading with the dawn. Or vague companions of comforting cosiness: her cats, Pancake and Teacup; a chest of drawers from her London bedroom (evoking one where she and her twin brother Paul were cradled as babies) with the bust of Nefertiti that sits on it. Why Nefertiti? “She’s cool, slightly mysterious, a symbol of Egypt. My great-grandfather came from Nubia. He was a slave in the Ottoman empire, given his freedom in Cyprus. He married another Nubian there, and they had my grandfather.” Also, she adds: “She looks really good with my cats, and she’s a great shape for the paintings.”This Middle Eastern element of her heritage — she was born in Britain to a Turkish-Cypriot father and an English mother of Romanichal descent — has seeped into her new paintings, where patterned motifs such as you’d see on Asian rugs suddenly appear on headboards or in an apparently carpeted corner. She has a fine collection of these rugs, apparently. “I walk over the carpets. It’s where I live.” Now spending the majority of her time away from London and back (“full circle”) in her hometown of Margate, she talks of a new sense of rootedness. “I love home and I love my cats. I love being cosy. I like dolls’ houses, I like miniature things. I like my house, nesting. It’s creeping into my paintings. Like the carpets, the patterning. “My secondary subject at the Royal College of Art was sacred geometry. I loved the mystical side. And there’s the gypsy side of my family: who doesn’t love tarot cards? It’s gentle in Margate, and I love being by the sea. Sometimes I just want to be at home, painting carpets.”This probably has to be taken with a pinch of salt. She makes Margate sound like a retreat, but in fact she has an extremely energetic life there, acquiring and renovating building after building, a one-woman regeneration programme for the dilapidated town. Apart from her own resplendent studio, she runs a vibrant art school programme. In her London life, she is on the Council of the Royal Academy and a trustee of the British Museum. Her work, too, shows no sign of lessened ambition. The new show has a gorgeous selection of small-scale paintings no bigger than an A4 sheet: they are like peering into intense, condensed dramas. By contrast, there is a mighty seven-metre bronze called “I followed you to the end”. It is an abstracted version of a headless female figure, crouching, rendered rough-hewn, almost neolithic: it makes you feel, if you creep between its trunk-like thighs, as if it is the living rock. It’s destined, Weller tells me, for Emin’s next show, in Florence. So although Emin says she has no more gallery shows planned until 2026, museum shows are coming fast. But, she insists, despite a furious rate of production, there’s no giving in to what she calls “fodder art”. “There’s nothing cynical about what I do — ever.”‘I followed you to the end’, White Cube Bermondsey, London, September 19-November 10, whitecube.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
