For decades, the British art scene has looked on Tracey Emin as one of its most iconic and divisive figures. Her confessional artworks are practically unparalleled for their raw vulnerability and ability to express a turbulent emotional landscape that – let’s be honest – most Brits have a hard time coming to terms with in private, never mind sharing it on a national stage. But that’s exactly what Emin has done, refusing to compromise amid her meteoric rise from art school upstart to certified star, whose works have graced walls everywhere from the Royal Academy to (controversially) 10 Downing Street.

This month, Tate Modern will host a landmark exhibition spanning 40 years of Emin’s work. Across painting, video, textiles, writing, sculpture, and installation, a few themes emerge again and again over the course of those four decades, including love, trauma, and the female body as a site of both passion and pain. A brush with death after she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer in 2020 – referenced in the title of the Tate show, A Second Life – lends an added sense of perspective, and in interviews, the artist has spoken about the after-effects of the resulting surgeries with her typical, unfiltered candour. 

But it would be a mistake to see Emin’s art as an act of pure self-exploration (or even self-indulgence). Whether or not you relate to her works on a personal or political level, we surely all stand to benefit from the kinds of frank discussions they spark about life, creativity, and what it means to be human. With that in mind, we dive deep into Emin’s life and art in the dA-Zed guide below.

A IS FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY

For Emin, the line between public and personal has always been thin, or maybe non-existent. This was evident from her first solo show, where she exhibited personal photos alongside memorabilia from notable events in her life, including a pack of cigarettes that her uncle was allegedly holding when he was decapitated in a car crash.

B IS FOR BED

Obviously... My Bed (1998) is probably Emin’s best-known artwork, shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999. Inspired by a depressive, drunken, four-day reclusive period following a breakup, it quite literally consists of an unmade bed, complete with cigarette butts, condoms, and underwear stained with menstrual blood. Many critics were outraged when it was first exhibited, and middle-aged men up and down the country were heard claiming: “I could exhibit my unmade bed!” But they didn’t, did they? And that’s why they won’t go down in art history.

Emin had previously refused to sell work to the ad man and art collector Charles Saatchi, because of his advertising for Margaret Thatcher. As the stories go, though, she was convinced to sell him My Bed for £150,000 in 2000, later saying: “That meeting changed everything for me… The sale of the bed was my deposit for a house. Something I never dreamt would be possible.”

C IS FOR CROYDON

Emin was born in the South London borough in 1963, to a Turkish Cypriot father and a mother of Romani descent, although she was raised in the seaside town of Margate, which exerted a much bigger influence on her life and work. That said, Emin has recently returned to Croydon – alongside other London boroughs such as Walthamstow and Tower Hamlets – for a neon-themed billboard campaign that accompanies A Second Life.

D IS FOR DRAWING

Drawing is an often-underacknowledged part of Emin’s oeuvre, despite playing a significant role in her practice alongside printmaking, a medium that she studied at Maidstone College of Art in the mid-80s. Stylistically indebted to artists like Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, her gestural drawings often feature nude figures, exploring subjects like sexuality and shame. “Some of my favourite drawings I have done with my eyes closed,” she told the Guardian in 2009, “or so drunk I do not remember making them.”

E IS FOR ENFANT TERRIBLE (... OR ESTABLISHMENT)

Even in a scene dominated by larger-than-life figures like Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk, and Sarah Lucas, Emin was known as Britart’s enfant terrible – a label that often reduced her complex, conceptual works to acts of provocation or “attention seeking”. Today, though, she’s more likely to be described as a “national treasure” than an unruly rebel. In 2024, she was even awarded a DBE, after receiving a CBE in 2013. So actually, it’s Dame Tracey Emin, to the likes of us.

F IS FOR FIRE

In the early 2000s, Tracey Emin was an established figure in a red-hot art scene that included Hirst, the Chapman brothers, Gary Hume, and Chris Ofili. Maybe too hot, in fact. In 2004, Charles Saatchi’s east London-based Momart warehouse, which contained more than 100 of their works, burned down, wiping out a significant portion of art history. Among the lost artworks was Emin’s famous appliqué tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995). “This news comes between Iraqi weddings being bombed and people dying in the Dominican Republic in flash floods – so we have to get it into perspective,” she stated at the time. “But I am really gutted. I just thank God no one was hurt.”

G IS FOR GIRLHOOD

“A lot of people are really derogatory about my work and say it’s just art that something like a teenage girl would make,” Emin told the Independent in 2004, in an interview about her only feature film, Topspot. “Well, yeah, it is, because I’m still stuck in a teenage world, part of me is still there. I’m still dealing with those issues and a lot of people always are.” Throughout her career, the artist has been candid about what she means by teenage “issues”, citing instances of abuse, violence and sexual assault in Margate. This has often informed interpretations of her art.

H IS FOR HANGMAN BOOKS

In the 80s, Emin studied at what was then known as Medway College of Design, where she met Billy Childish, an expelled student and member of the punk poetry group the Medway Poets. During her studies, followed by a printmaking course at Maidstone Art College, she was in a relationship with Childish and worked for his small confessional poetry press, Hangman Books. It was an emotionally turbulent time, but she would later describe it as one of the biggest influences on her life.

I IS FOR ILLNESS

In 2020, Emin was diagnosed with bladder cancer. The treatment required the removal of her bladder and several other organs, and required a stoma (a hole in her abdomen) to drain urine. During the treatment, she said: “I think my art, my love of everything, and my passion is what’s kept me alive in the last few months.” Since then, she’s spoken openly about the illness and its physical repercussions, as well as how it changed her outlook on life.

J IS FOR JUDGE AND JURY

The response to the Momart warehouse fire among the tabloids was emblematic of the controversy around Emin’s work at the time. “Didn’t millions cheer as this ‘rubbish’ went up in flames?” asked the Daily Mail, while the journalist and author Tony Parsons wrote in the Mirror: “Can a fire ever be funny? Only if all the overpriced, over-discussed trash that we have had rammed down our throats in recent years by these ageing enfant terribles is consumed by the fire. Then the fire is not merely funny... it is bloody hilarious.”

Emin was always polarising, with the public and critics alike dismissing early works as juvenile, scatalogical, and self-absorbed – not to mention the party-heavy lifestyle of the wider Brit art scene. Often this criticism was wildly reductive, overlooking her experimental, subversive, and now-influential approach to making art. Funnily enough, male conceptual artists rarely got the same scale of public disapproval.

K IS FOR KITSCH

What happens when an artist whose brilliance lies in their spiky subversion of the status quo becomes part of the very system they’re set on critiquing? In 2014, the art critic Jonathan Jones wrote: “Any sense of real subversion or originality Emin ever conveyed has long since been packaged, copyrighted, and reproduced as kitsch self-caricature.” (Admittedly, he’s since changed his tune, which seems to have something to do with visiting her mountain hideaway on the Côte d’Azur.) This statement might seem harsh, but throughout the 2010s, it wasn’t an uncommon opinion, as the likes of My Bed transitioned from a shocking statement to a museum piece.

L IS FOR LONELINESS

Where shock once lived at the centre of Emin’s work, the gradual acceptance of her more radical ideas coincided with a renewed focus on tenderness and emotions. Solitude and loneliness are two key themes that have recurred since the mid-2000s, especially in her sculpture and paintings, which she exhibited alongside Edvard Munch masterpieces at the 2021 RA exhibition The Loneliness of the Soul.

M IS FOR MINKY MANKY

Curated by Carl Freedman, the 1995 exhibition Minky Manky was a breakthrough moment, placing Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (which included Freedman’s name) alongside art by more famous artists like Sarah Lucas and Gilbert & George. She explained that this was a way of “getting back at” the curator after he suggested her smaller-scale work “wouldn’t stand up well” alongside the likes of Lucas. As it turned out, the infamous tent became one of the stars of the show.

N IS FOR NEON

If you’ve pulled into St Pancras station on the Eurostar, you’ve probably seen Emin’s bright pink, 20-metre neon sign reading: “I want my time with you.” Aimed at Europe, the artwork voiced solidarity with Europeans, as well as concern about Britain’s status following the Brexit vote in 2016. Similar neon signs have appeared over the course of Emin’s career, from wordless images of birds, to calls for “more passion” (more on that in a bit).

O IS FOR ORGASM

Created in 2001, Automatic Orgasm is a textile work that mixes sexual and religious imagery – specifically, a cross overlaid with the text “Come unto me”. “‘Come unto me’ was what Jesus said, and it also is like the idea of coming, isn’t it?,” she explained at the time of the 2011 exhibition Love Is What You Want, adding that good sex can sometimes feel like crucifixion (where she’s the cross). While being an outspoken advocate for women’s pleasure in both her art and interviews, however, her own relationship with sex is “complicated” and has included long periods of celibacy.

P IS FOR POMP AND CEREMONY

What words come to mind when you picture the late Queen Elizabeth II? For Emin, it was “strong and sexy and strident”, apparently. The artist met the monarch twice and drew her in 2012. She also drew a picture of Prince William and Kate Middleton kissing on their wedding day (cute...) and, more recently, praised King Charles for his support of the arts. In fact, she thinks that everyone in the UK should embrace the “pomp and ceremony” of the royal family, although she would “never, ever, ever” want to be part of it herself due to their lack of freedom. Duly noted.

Q IS FOR QUILT

Textiles might seem like a softer alternative to neon or gestural painting, but not Emin’s. Pulling together threads from across her life and practice, her blankets, quilts and tapestries channel just as many raw emotions and confrontational ideas as any other facet of her work (see: ‘Hate and Power Can Be a Terrible Thing’ (2004), 2002’s ‘I do not expect’, or 1997’s ‘Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone’s Been There’). Her use of the medium to send feminist messages also undermines traditional ideas about textiles as “women’s work”.

R IS FOR RETROSPECTIVE

Emin’s first solo show was at White Cube in November 1993, with the tongue-in-cheek title My Major Retrospective. It included the ashes of work that she’d made while sharing a shop with Sarah Lucas, and subsequently burned, alongside personal photographs, teenage diaries, photos of her destroyed early paintings, and ephemera such as her uncle’s cigarettes (mentioned above).

S IS FOR SCHOOL

Three years after her cancer diagnosis, Emin set up her own art school in Margate. Housed in an old public bathhouse that also hosts affordable studio spaces bearing her name, the school is free (although admissions are presumably very competitive). It’s also set to expand, among other additions to Margate that are being supported by the artist, including a cafe that trains young unemployed people and a planned community centre.

T IS FOR TORIES

In 2011, Britain was still reeling from the 2008 economic crash and entering an era of declining living standards later known as the Lost Decade, while a Tory-Lib Dem coalition had just dramatically raised university fees, triggering nationwide protests. Amid this chaos, Emin made a brave declaration: the Tories were the “only hope” for the arts. (See? She hadn’t lost the power to provoke!) If that wasn’t disappointing enough, 2011 granted us a photo of Emin kissing Tory leader David Cameron, followed by the unveiling of a neon artwork – the aforementioned More Passion (2010) – at 10 Downing Street. To be fair, Emin asked for its removal in 2022, in response to government misconduct during Covid – but for many that was too little, too late.

U IS FOR UNORTHODOX UNION

In 2015, Tracey Emin married a stone. A large, ancient stone, covered in lichen, with a sea view. “[It’s] beautiful, it’s palaeolithic, it’s monumental, it’s dignified,” she told the Guardian a year later, after the honeymoon period had cooled off. “It will never, ever let me down.” 

V IS FOR VENICE

In 2007, Emin represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and was only the second solo female artist to do so. This landmark exhibition, which solidified her arrival on the international art scene, was titled Borrowed Light and spanned a variety of media, and she was praised for her “ability to reach just below the level of tastefulness”.

W IS FOR WHITE CUBE

Far from just hosting her debut solo show, White Cube has played a significant role in Emin’s career, across more than three decades. The London gallery has hosted many of her solo shows over the years, from the post-Turner Prize You Forgot to Kiss My Soul, through her transition to primarily painting in the late 2000s, right through to 2024’s I followed you to the end.

X IS FOR EX

This might seem like an obvious choice given the theme of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (although it’s a misconception that the artwork only lists ex-lovers – it also includes people the artist had simply shared a bed with, including her grandma). Ex-lovers undeniably played a role in her life outside the tent as well, though, from Billy Childish to Carl Freedman, and she influenced their lives in turn. During their relationship, Emin was a prominent subject in Childish’s poems, paintings, and the autobiographical novel My Fault, while her rise to fame often saw him referred to as simply “Tracey Emin’s ex-boyfriend”. Others, like Freedman and the painter Mat Collishaw, remained firm friends.

Y IS FOR YBA

If you’ve made it this far, you probably already know about the Young British Artists, the loose group of... well, young, British artists that counted Emin among its number in the late 1980s. Mostly graduated from Goldsmiths or, like Emin, the Royal College of Art, their social antics and group exhibitions – largely supported by Saatchi – definitely contributed to the lasting success of each individual. Some have come off better than others, of course...

Z IS FOR ZEITGEIST

Speaking to Louis Theroux in 2024, Emin noted that male artists have a tendency to “sort of peak in their 40s”, citing Damien Hirst as a prime example. “Damien was a young artist who started off with a lot of that belief and a lot of that conviction,” she said. “He was like a force. And now he’s not.” Women, on the other hand, “just tend to come and come and come and come and come”.

Tracey Emin, A Second Life runs at Tate Modern from February 26 to August 31.