‘I just started painting and painting and painting and painting,’ says Tracey Emin, who has spent the last few years exploring the medium in a series of works now exhibiting at White Cube Bermondsey in London. ‘I was quite angry about something – very angry, actually. I started writing over the paintings, and I never know what I'm going to write. It's just automatic. The words “I followed you to the end” came out. I was thinking about when you really believe in something or someone, and you will do anything for them, you will follow them to the complete end, and that's what I felt I'd done. And by following something or someone to the end, I realised it was the end, because I knew where the end was.’
The exhibition, taking its title from this moment of explicit awareness, traces Emin’s journey through loss. Teetering on the precipice of life and death, works consider the finality of emotion hand-in-hand with references to her recent personal exposure to the void. After a diagnosis of aggressive bladder cancer in 2020, Emin underwent major surgery that saw the removal of the affected, and surrounding, organs.
It is an ordeal that takes a visceral form in her works. In a video filmed by Emin, available to view in the exhibition, the pulsing red of her stoma becomes gushes of red spilling across her paintings. The body, reclining on the bed or in the bath, fades into the canvas when confronted by the often beautiful and tender pastels, in lavender and pretty pink gradients of blood.
‘When you have a stoma, sometimes it bleeds and sometimes this circle around the edge bleeds,’ says Emin. ‘But it's not a big deal. It's not a bad thing. It's fucking annoying, because it happens almost every day, and it can be a lot of blood, or no blood. This film is of my daily ritual, when I change my bag and see my stoma often bleeding, and it’s a bit like my bedroom [My Bed, 1998], in a way, I thought, oh, I hate this so much, but God no, it's actually quite beautiful. It's just the way you're looking at it, it’s how you perceive it. Because my stoma keeps me alive, this blood that is flowing is my blood, and that should be a positive thing. My blood is flowing. It's pulsing, it's breathing, it's alive.’
‘I had to get to the top of my mountain, not other people’s mountains, mine, to understand what is really important to me, and it’s painting’
Tracey Emin
The volatile palette and raw dripping of the blood make an agonised foil for the softer tributes to a life, culminating in a tension between life and death. Among the wounds, the bleeding and the confrontations of mortality are autobiographical acknowledgments of support, such as Emin’s much-loved cats who silently keep watch in works big and small, pictured against her richly drawn domestic world. Ultimately, the paintings are love letters to the medium itself.
‘If all my work that I made before, everything – the sewing, the films, the photographs, the performances – if everything were a mountain, and I was climbing up the mountain, up the rock face, and then I get to the peak of the mountain and I get my flagpole and I stick it in, I attach my flag, and hoist my flag up as my flag blows in the wind. That is my painting. That is where my painting is, but it’s taken me all of that time to get up this rock face and all these different things to understand and appreciate that I had to get to the top of my mountain, not other people's mountains, mine, to understand what is really important to me, and it's painting.’
Tracey Emin, ‘I followed you to the end’ at White Cube Bermondsey, London, 19 September – 10 November 2024
