RHEA WILLSON 

As I enter the blood-stained walls of the White Cube in London, I feel the weight of pain and loss that is commemorated around me - the vastness of love and the expansiveness of loss, the limits of survival and the cataclysm of suffering.

Art is about revelation. It is about learning new things about yourself, or learning about the experience of those who are represented on the canvas. British artist Tracey Emin has achieved all of this in her latest exhibition, laying her heart bare in yet another autobiographical exposure of her innermost body and soul. Emin has stood the test of time as a prominent name in postmodernist movements, feminism and the art world. Moving to London when she was just fifteen, her tumultuous relationship with older men, her body and health is captured in her art, producing a body of work imbued with passion and ingenuity.

After graduating with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, her work became a part of the scandalous Young British Artists, attracting media attention through her rejection of the male gaze. Her 1999 exhibition My Bed is undoubtedly her best-known piece, representing the fall-out of a relationship portrayed in the detritus that litters her bed. Having stayed in the bed for four days, it was installed at the Tate Modern, strewn with the empty vodka bottles, cigarettes and used condoms that had remained untouched after she left it. This piece was perhaps a hint towards third-wave feminism at the time, whereby the bed symbolised the nature of female sexuality, defined by women to be understood by women. 

With bedsheets and underwear stained with menstrual blood, My Bed made clear that from early in her career, Emin would remain bold, unapologetic, and deeply involved in the voices of women in the artworld. In fact, Emin’s views on feminism provide a new perspective in which to perceive her paintings. In a statement for The Brooklyn Museum, she said, “I know having a penis definitely affects your wage packet, but I’m not bitter and twisted. I’m grateful to all the women that work so hard to enable women like me to have a voice. And I’m still shouting.” 

Emin recurrently defers to the female body as a landscape in which to express the rawness of her emotions, exploring both the strengths and weaknesses of the female form. In fact, Emin’s work could be interpreted as feminist expression itself, rejecting the expectations of women, by showing the body for what it is. An amalgamation of personal experiences and societal perceptions, Emin puts brush to canvas with such intensity that she creates an unfiltered look at what it means to be a woman without the judgemental eyes of the patriarchy. In doing so, the female body is presented as a site of power, resilience and exposure. 

Her latest exhibition I Followed You to the End in London’s White Cube gallery, Emin puts shame onto the backseat, driven instead by the splayed legs of women, of breasts hung naturally, and of bodies experiencing pain in its rawest form. In this exhibition, she continues her unmeasured excavation of bodily fluids, their malleability and a further look into the mind of the artist herself. Blurring the lines between public and private, Emin beautifully demonstrates in this series that intimacy can be self-reflective, instead of tied to sexual gratification. Her paintings show how intimacy lies within, with self-expression and the reclamation of bodily agency. 

The walls of the exhibition are bright white; the only other colours permeating the room are the sharp maroons and intense blacks spread across the canvases. The energy of every painting builds in intensity, as each brushstroke is simultaneously sporadic yet purposeful. Tracing the lines, figures are fragmented into distorted shapes, defiantly placing them as the centre point of the frame. As the women in the works remain curled up in bathtubs, or bent double in pain, the audience is left with the heaviness of their agony. The figures are trapped in their ghostly appearance, in endless cycles of exposure and discomfort, unlike the onlookers, who are able to walk away and move on.

Or perhaps they are not. 

Emin’s inspiration for the use of blood in this series came initially from a diagnosis of bladder cancer in 2020. In the exhibition, audiences can watch as a video of her stoma bag fills with blood, pouring over canvases in cycles. In her own words, Emin says that “my blood is flowing. It’s pulsing, it’s breathing, it’s alive.” Confronted with these paintings, we come to face our own vulnerabilities and exposure, embodying the weight of the colours that are reminiscent of death and decay. Yet, what Emin achieves so innovatively, is to instead contort the reds and blacks into a revelation of ‘aliveness’ and vitality. 

Herein lies the intention of Emin’s work – to allow onlookers to get just about as close to sources of pain as they can without physically experiencing it themselves. Perhaps reminiscent in the brushstrokes themselves, the purposeful distortion of the lines exemplifies the complex nature of the female body, as both a site of suffering and a generative life source. The complexities of the individual pain women experience, alongside their bodily capacity for beauty and creation, makes the female form a setting of multifaceted complexities and paradoxical interpretation.

Coming face-to-face with these pieces, I was reminded of a term coined by writer Maureen McHugh as ‘menstrual moaning.’ The term refers to the negative relationship between women and menstruation, arguing that cultural attitudes towards the menstrual cycle associate bleeding with secrecy and shame. In this way, Emin’s work represents the epitome of this rejection, embracing the realness of suffering and the roots of her pain. Constantly existing within cycles of discomfort and grief, the figures in the canvases live outside of the shadow of indignity, basking in the puddles of red that pool around them. 

Her struggle with cancer is a recurring motif in this exhibition, showcasing figures wavering between life and death. Often, it is difficult to tell where they are on this scale, alluding to the uncertainty of her own diagnosis. Coming so close to death itself provides an interesting commentary on pain, specifically the pain that is embodied in women. Whether it’s hormonal development, menstrual pains, childbirth or menopause, pain finds itself embedded into the everyday experiences of women universally. 

This is without mentioning a steady rise in violence against women and girls that mark and torment the lived experiences of women. At the age of thirteen, Tracey Emin suffered from an undocumented rape, which is important to remember when discussing her work and their relations to womanhood. Experiencing violence external to the cycles of pain inside the body, Emin’s work demonstrates the strength and vitality of women and the enduring power of the human body. In doing so, Emin shows how close women and girls come to death regularly, each individually trapped in a canvas of their own suffering. 

In the centre of the exhibition lies a statue, hard to miss in its 690 x 393 cm glory. The sculpture shows two legs bent on the floor, a symbolic representation of her own struggles of love, loss, pain and joy. The open interpretation of the piece allows audiences to imbue any type of meaning onto its structure, deepening the emotional experience and interaction with the rest of the paintings hung around it. The expansiveness of the sculpture juxtaposes the weakness of its form with the solidity of its size, a nod to the ways that pain never really leaves you, but that there is strength in that vulnerability. 

I Followed You to the End must simply be understood as a wander through Emin’s life itself. As she is laid bare, every painting is different, yet there exists a central thread – women, in all of their varieties, naked and unapologetically so. Despite the themes of loss and sorrow, survival is woven through the paintings and presented in the footsteps of the people occupying the space. Transforming suffering into a tale of resistance and power, Emin demonstrates that women have been and will continue to be strong in their endurance, whilst using vulnerability as a means of emancipation. 

With feminist movements such as ‘free bleeding’, which lets periods flow without the intervention of period products, or women in South Korea refusing to have children until the rights of working mothers are addressed, it is clear that the themes of Emin’s exhibition run in parallel with the lived experiences of women around the globe. Her exhibition shows the power women hold in lying in bed in pain or curled up on the floor with a hot water bottle. It shows that women undergo constant cycles of rebirth, reimagining a life where their bodies are appreciated without fear of embarrassment or shame, acknowledging that suffering will pass and that the female body is brazenly dynamic. 

As I walked around the exhibition, I – like the figures in the paintings – was undergoing this cycle of regeneration. As my own body lost blood, and as my stomach cramps persisted, I found joy in the unregretful nature of her art. Staring at each painting, I thought of friends, of my mother, and of all the women that have come before me. Of their power, potency and endurance. 

In Emin’s own words “the most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at.”