Spotlighting Feminism - Tracey Emin

By Cressie Edmondson

You have probably heard of the pioneering, ‘bad girl of British art’ (The Art Story) Dame Tracey Emin, whose life inspired her artwork. You can catch her art whether you're arriving at King's Cross Station in London or wandering around the White Cube in Bermondsey, depending on what your vibe is! Her heart-breaking story resounds through her works.

Figure 1: Tracey Emin, 2021, taken by Hang Up Pictures, https://hanguppictures.com/editorial/super-woman-why-tracey-emin-standing-up-to-the-haters-is-good-for-you-too 

Emin’s Life and Art                                                            

Emin was born in 1963 in Croydon, she began her career in 1997, building a large and impressive portfolio of artworks. She engages with different media, such as neon lights, oil on canvas and sculpture, with all equally as striking. Despite facing numerous personal issues, including sexual assault in her youth, her artwork represents a form of therapy, confronting her trauma through something she loves; creating.

Feminism in the art world and the Male Gaze

When asked, during her interview for art school, for the opinion she held on feminism, Emin replied ‘I don’t’. However, this changed throughout her life. Later, she stated that she thinks about it in ‘an everyday way and in a historic way’. In 2007, Emin was selected to produce art for the prestigious 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Her exhibition title Borrowed Light, which consisted of artwork of which she deemed ‘pretty and hard-core’ made her the second woman to produce a solo show for the UK in the biennale, further reinforcing her position as a trailblazing women in art. Nowadays, female artists have equalled or outweighed male artists in the Venice Biennale, as seen during the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Body Politics and the Unapologetic Truth

Emin tackles themes of female body politics and the male gaze (a term coined by Laura Mulvey) in her artwork through blurring the boundaries between contrived beauty and real life. Emin’s artworks portray real life events in a way not idealised but brutal; depicting confessional elements of her own life such as abortion and miscarriages. Emin deconstructs the male gaze by disobeying the long embedded patriarchal elements of the art world. She does not glamourise the female experience in her art, but she shows how it can be messy and uncomfortable. Stripping her artwork of any sugar-coating, she leaves the viewer to reflect on her many depictions of herself in her hardest moments.

Dame Tracey Emin paints what no man dares to paint: she deliberately de-eroticises (from the male gaze) the most intimate and personal parts of a woman’s life, including sex. She was a member of the YBA (Young British Artists) movement which started in 1988 with the likes of her contemporary Damien Hirst, an experimental group which aimed to push boundaries of traditional art. This gave her a foundation for fame and an association with notorious and controversial artwork, a fundamental part of her career which led to international recognition.

Emin is very open about her sex life, her promiscuity as a young women, which was seen as taboo. Her artwork Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1995) which was part of the artwork created as a YBA and which she gained recognition for, shows a tent with stitched names of people with whom she had slept with, in a sexual and non-sexual way, including her grandmother and her two aborted foetuses. It is haunting to see her grandmother along with all the men she had slept with, as this blurs the lines between feeling safe and unsafe vulnerability. We see her wounds through her impulsive brush strokes, referring to the chaos of her trauma. Her unflinching reproductions of her experience do not show her being objectified by men, but are acts of empowerment, urging women to speak out and to reclaim their bodies as their own, not just a sexual object.

Figure 2: Tracey Emin, detail of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1995, Fabric, embroidery.

Figure 3: Tracey Emin, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1995, Fabric, embroidery

Love, Loss and the Truth

In her early works, Emin was unflinchingly honest. In her artwork, My Bed she exposes the real and gritty truths of her life. Exhibited in 1999 in Tate Gallery, we see used condoms, cigarette ends, empty bottles of vodka, showing the decadence of her life and her raw vulnerability. This approach to creating art shows her unapologetic honesty. 

Figure 4: Tracey Emin, My Bed, Box frame, mattress, linens, pillows and various objects, 1999, Lent by The Duerckheim Collection 2015, on long term loan

White Cube in 2024

Contrastingly, in her later works, particularly, in her works exhibited at the White Cube in 2024, in the exhibition titled, I Followed you to the end (19 September-10 November), the viewer is faced with canvases saturated with red depicting heartbreak, loneliness and remorse. A huge cast bronze sculpture titled I Followed you To The End (2024) envelops the viewers in the fraught emotions emitted by Emin artworks: loneliness, loss and the passage of time. Her artworks teeters on the edge of life and death as she navigates loss: loss of a lover, a family member, her innocence, youth. The exhibition heavily alludes to death and the fragility of life, with references to Greek mythology, particularly Charon, the ferryman of the Greek underworld who carries souls across the river Styx to receive their judgement from Hades. Does this imply Emin’s state of mind fluctuates between life and death? That is how some of her artworks seem. This exhibition continues her overarching artistic vision to challenge what it means to be a woman and does so with visceral attention to the good and bad parts of life, historically missing from the depiction of women in traditional oeuvres.

Figure 5: Inside I Followed you To the End, White Cube, 2024.

Emin’s artworks hold agency as she is a pioneering woman in the world of art, unapologetically showing her emotions and her imperfect life. Her continuous fight of redefining art for women, and moving away from the male gaze, and implementing the female gaze - a real uncensored depiction of what it is to be a woman - is truly inspiring.