Clad in a black t-shirt bearing her own name and the number 69 in bold gold letters, Tracey Emin (CBE) spoke to Dylan Jones (OBE) about her experiences with bladder cancer, life in Margate, and what she thinks of Sir Keir Starmer at what was clearly the biggest event of the day at the festival, with the Baillie Gifford tent stuffed to the gills.
Emin took the capacity audience back to 2020; a time when she was enjoying the peacefulness of London during lockdown. “I was lying naked in the sun on my roof in Fournier Street, drinking champagne and waving at the vicar and his wife in the church garden below.”
It was at that time that she received her diagnosis, after consulting a gynaecologist following ten years without sex. “I’d fallen in love,” Emin admitted, “and I wanted to make sure everything was working.”
Bladder cancer, she said, is “the eighth biggest killer, but no one talks about it because it mostly affects the working class.” She was candid about the gruelling operation that ultimately saved her life. “They removed my bladder, urethra, lymph nodes, half the wall of my vagina, and my womb.” There was one thing, however, which she insisted they leave intact. “Please, not my clitoris,” she told her doctor, who granted her wish.
Emin said it was her acceptance of death that kept her alive. “You need to preserve all your strength to fight the cancer,” she explained. “Panicking is the worst thing one can do.
“I’ve always been very nihilistic, very rock‘n’roll” she laughed. “I’d accepted that I might die being an averagely ok, slightly controversial artist.” Later on, she imagined what people would say about her art after she died. “They’d probably go, ‘What the hell happened there?’”
The operation on her bladder was, she argued, cathartic. “It had always been f***ed up – at one point, I thought people had cursed me,” she admitted to Jones. Having it removed felt like “hell had been lifted off [her] shoulders.”
The experience has also made the artist more grateful for life, and optimistic about every moment. “I don’t have guilt as a survivor. I feel happy about it,” she announced to rapturous applause.
The artist cited smoking as her biggest regret, hinting that it could have been a major factor in her illness. The self-care she’s embraced since her diagnosis has made her, she said, a better artist and a better person. Indeed, Emin said she’d felt “the closest to creativity since [she] was young”.
“I haven’t been drinking for three years,” she announced. “And it’s made my work more wild, more free, and with more energy. I’m more alive now than I have ever been.”
From sculpture to painting, Emin has embraced going back to her artisanal roots. “Nothing is made without my hands,” she declared. The conversation then moved on to Margate, where Emin grew up from age three to fifteen, and where she’s now at the helm of an artistic renaissance.
“Margate was pretty glamorous when I was young, but in the seventies it went to the doldrums,” she recalled. “One in three people were unemployed, and it had the highest level of incest in the country,” she claims.
Things have turned a corner since the Turner Contemporary gallery, situated on Margate’s beach, was founded. Along with her long-time friend and gallerist Carl Freedman and his associate Robert Diament, she rescued a former bathhouse and mortuary which has now been turned into the Tracey Emin Foundation, with an art school and studio space for artists. With this, Emin is giving creative opportunities to young people who never had them before.
She expanded on the role of art: “It’s not about the welfare state, and it’s a pretty bourgeois subject,” she recognised. “But it’s cathartic. My mum used to say that, ‘If Tracey didn’t have art, she’d be dead by now’.”
“I wish more people would do what I’m doing,” she added. “If you can help someone right now, help them. I don’t mean that in a socialist way. I’m talking about human kindness.”
Jones took this opportunity to ask the artist more pointedly political questions; notably, how she’d vote in the next election. Emin is a hard one to put in a box. “I supported Cameron’s government because they did amazing things for the arts,” she said. “Labour’s never really liked the arts.”
However, she said she wanted to see a new government come into power. She reserved her most virulent criticism for Boris Johnson. “I thought his behaviour during the pandemic was despicable,” she said.
Emin urged Labour to make health and education its top priorities. She did, however, have choice words for Sir Keir Starmer. “The wildest thing that’s ever happened to him is living above a Thai massage parlour,” Emin laughed. “He has no edge.”
