British artist Tracey Emin learns to face challenges calmly
Stroking her cat Teacup in her studio in Margate, Tracey Emin lets slip that the threat of death from cancer has made her certain about the afterlife. “You become part of the sun,” she explains. “You disperse and become light. That is the final, final frontier, the last stop: becoming pure light. But you will be judged,” she cheerfully adds. “If you really messed up everything you have, and if you’re greedy, it all comes with you. And if you really love animals, they come with you — every single pet you have ever had. If you love clothes, you take your whole wardrobe. Me, I just want to go as light as possible.”
To hold a conversation with Tracey Emin is to enter a stream of consciousness that is diverting, compelling and at times raw, but always original. Very much like her art. From famous works such as My Bed to her visceral later paintings and sculptures, which sell for up to £2m at auction, Emin has a knack for capturing life at its most earthy and emotionally truthful, its most vulnerable and human. So when we meet to discuss her new show and her future, it’s a little surprising to hear her talk about a world beyond our own.
Well, perhaps not for everyone. She chuckles as she explains how some people get stuck in the afterlife process and end up as wandering ghosts. “I never believed in God, but I now do in an afterlife,” she says. Her thoughts may be a response to the question her dying mother asked her — “Where am I going?” — to which she had no answer at the time; but they have brought her tranquillity when she most needed it. She talks of the fragility of her own survival. “I was told I might only have six months, but I felt very calm, as I am in big moments. It’s a bit like drowning: if you panic, you will definitely die. If calm, you breathe and see where the water’s going, where the air bubbles are rising, and you swim up and are OK.” Tracey was heroically stoic during her cancer ordeal, which happened during the pandemic. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is so difficult,’ after I was told I may not be around at Christmas. My tactic was, ‘I’ll just let death take care of itself, because if you’re going to die, you’re going to die; I’ll get on with the living.’”
In her cavernous Margate studio, she is surrounded by new and half-finished paintings. They display the power of her use of line, with figures that appear ragged, almost scrawled, yet explode with sensuality and emotion and sensational heat, colour bursting violently around them, sometimes even smothering them entirely. She has a hidden permanent urine bag under her clothes after her bladder was removed by cancer surgeons; she also had a complete hysterectomy. It is a physical drama that she manages and accepts.
After the trauma came remission, and tuning back into her art and life. “I have never been more active. Tracey Emin is working like a demon!” she says, a smile erupting into laughter. And today that laughter never seems far away. “I have never been happier or more content,” she declares. Painter, sun-seer, poet, philosopher, exquisite draughtswoman and Britain’s most celebrated female artist, she has reached “national treasure” status, practically becoming an eminence grise, having once been an enfant terrible and a drunken provocateur.
Today, she is quietly philosophical. “I think we all change every seven years, and I feel in a new stage and am loving it: living each day like the last, grabbing life,” she says. “I can feel the change inside me. I look back and my whole life is different. Twenty years ago, invitations would have lured me out, all dolled up in a pretty dress at summer parties until late. Massive drinking. Not for me now.” Sobriety is one of the changes. “Giving up drink has been totally transformative,” she says. “I love it. I wish I’d done it before. But when I did it in 2008, I felt suicidal. It was horrific and I hated it. I wasn’t surrounded by the right people. Your life’s got to feel like it’s worth living, and you have to build a solid base around you.”
Becoming teetotal was gradual. “Having bladder cancer is really good, a useful thing to stop drinking,” she notes with gallows humour. But what irks her is how she wasted time. “People go, ‘Oh my God, you’ve done so much work in the past four years,’ and I go, ‘Yeah, it’s because I don’t drink any more.’ So what would I have done in the past 40 years or so if I had been sober?”
She explains: “It wasn’t like I woke up every morning and had a drink. I was a binge drinker. So I’d go out and not have one drink but 10. My brain was too big for 10 drinks. And I was too small for 10 drinks. The whole thing was a nightmare. There are people like the Innu Indians (native peoples of North America), who shouldn’t drink because their blood cells are constructed differently. Well, I think I’m one of them. It’s poison for me, absolute poison.”
Another significant factor in her life is having obsessive-compulsive disorder. “You can be floored by tiny things that seem important when you’ve got really bad OCD,” she says. “But in the big scheme of things, I came out of it much better.”