i followed you to the end: On Tracey Emin (And Missing My Partner)

What does it mean for an artist to utilise their own lived experience as the genesis of their art? Using it to voice feelings difficult to speak, difficult to write even, translating them into swaths of colour, or a bronze, an object on a plinth, or, even once, an unmade bed. When speaking of this sensibility towards art, that is, the personal as primary medium, it’s a daunting task to call to mind any other artist with such clarity of vision than Tracey Emin. In her new show, I followed you to the end, at White Cube, Bermondsey, she continues the unabated purging of her psyche and body (which shot her to superstardom in the 1990s, as part of the Young British Artists generation) with all the blood-stained, tear-ridden fabrics which come along with it. Living profoundly for herself, and facing the turmoil of life head-on, she is still painfully aware one must push through to the other side of this pain, to then look back in awe, or at least with a newfound lease of life.

Twelve small paintings punctuate the stretching corridor of the gallery where, in this myopic and tender mode, the quality of Emin’s line is as rich here in the laptop-screen-sized works as it is in her larger canvases. Whether it’s the strength of a leg, bent at the knee, the foot dangling in mid-air; the volume of the breasts, ever present even when the figure is wrapped in bedsheets; the intensity of their faces, their saddened eyes, mouths slightly downturned, an exhale, quiet, whispering something, a prayer, or an ode. In the work, Trapped, a figure stares outwards, appearing to be walking away from the empty bird cage, the same size as her head, which sits behind her, the right side of her face is an assortment of suggestive marks, criss-crosses of phthalo blue – up, down, across, smudge, splodge – working in tandem. Her breasts rest on the lower edge of the canvas, made of a few decisive brushstrokes which, if observed for too long, dissolve into pure abstraction; a familiar approach for Emin. As the first painting of a show discussing her survival of cancer, a failed romantic relationship, and the sheer will to live, the symbolism of having a body walk away from a literal cage is hard to miss. Emin has broken free of everything which has tried to keep her caged, or, in this case, Trapped.

In 2020, Emin underwent a near-immediate, radical, lifesaving surgery to remove a rare form of cancer, involving the removal of her bladder, a full hysterectomy, lymph nodes, urethra, part of her vagina and large intestine, the construction of a stoma for urination, and now, subsequently, she lives with a urostomy bag. These new additions to Emin’s body are ever-present in the sum forty works on display, at times overtly, and elsewhere the surgery is suggested through a mark, so subtle, it could easily be missed. The cancer’s evisceration of her body is, however, on show no more explicitly than in the short video work, Tears of Blood, which documents the pulsating, oozing wound. The stoma protrudes from her side as a line of blood traces the contour of her abdomen, her heavily laboured breathing serving as the soundtrack. Surrounding the stoma is light bruising from the adhesives used to secure the urostomy bag, and below this, a pool of drying blood mirrors the bloody aperture. This shaky, minute-long, work, filmed by Emin on a hand-held camera, is so confronting in its approach towards the ailing (but surviving) body, I found myself exiting the auditorium to make my way around the show again, in search of the painted stoma. Indeed, I found it, scattered throughout, attaching itself to various figures, the blood from the film emerging as painted stainings and geysers of blood on the canvases.

Emin’s paintings burst with solitary nudes and forsaken pairings, couples so hopelessly intertwined, their bodies fuse and tangle, their emotions glueing them together. Masses of flesh and bedsheets. In, Not Fuckable, two figures rest atop a lake of blue and a hellish red sky forces them closer together. The lower figure sprawls across the width of the canvas, framed by the lake, while the second leans over them, their head inches away as if leaning in

for a kiss. Each body painted in the hue of closest proximity to them, red or blue, they start to blend, one’s arm becomes the side of the other’s torso, a shoulder becomes a breast, a hand a vagina. Paradoxically, they are engaging in an intimate act, while simultaneously (taking the title and construction of the image into account) revelling an underlying anxiety and failure towards this same act, with the red figure having his lower body disintegrate into waves of bedsheets, existing only as an upper torso made of scratchy brushstrokes and the mere proposal of form, a disillusion of the relationship, a foggy lover. In other works, a body is just barely visible, falling in and out of sight, peaking through the veil between worlds. Seen in the work, Take Me to Heaven, a body lies in bed, above her head, a halo, hearkening back to any choice of religious painterly reference. Blood is emptying from her vagina towards the edge of the bed and down towards the gallery floor. A river of pain. Kneeling silently at the edge of the bed in a purple haze, a spectre. This apparitional form could be Death appearing in a vision or, perhaps, the artist’s mother, who died back in 2016.

Emin mourns the loss of her organs and many people from her life in the show. Some possibly imagined, or indeed, devastatingly real, with the likes of her mother, and certainly, the romantic partner she was with before, and during, her cancer diagnosis (the relationship having broken down during her treatment), with the epicentre of her pain being in the North Gallery. Across the nine works in the space, Emin charts every emotion and possible sentiment one could feel in a relationship and its perceived, nearing, and then subsequent end. Works such as The End of Love, I Did Nothing Wrong, I Kept Crying, and Why was I crying are moments of sublime personal and (by proxy) collective revelation. We see her pain and, surely, we have all felt it too, the agonising over every movement and action, words said or unsaid, a particular look, or a touch which should have lingered longer on your shoulder than it did. And, still, we have all experienced the moment where we have snapped out if this spiral of self-pity, thinking to ourselves Why was I crying? We move on. We find a way to keep fighting, to keep living, even in the face of heartbreak. “One of the most destructive forces in the world is love” says Kathy Acker in her work, Blood and Guts in High School, “Love can tear anything to shreds” including a body. Yet, even so, even with a body which has been through more than most could reasonably cope with, Emin continues to shine.

Describing herself as a thin (and physical) painter, she is more importantly an intuitive artist, approaching the canvas with no preliminary sketch or understanding of what she is about to embark on. She simply begins. Throwing herself at the surface, brushstroke after brushstroke, the image appears – the results often surprising, occasionally disturbing – the paintings, acting as guides, tell her something “of which [she] is not completely sure about”. Speaking about the moment of her diagnosis, Emin describes pouring herself a glass of champagne, sitting in her studio, and looking at a painting, “this sort of red abstract painting, with a black sort of weird thing in it … thinking ‘what is that?’” It was while staring at this mass, and after another glass (or two), when the phone rang. On the other end, her gynaecologist. Four days later, she was in hospital. Four weeks later, she was in surgery having her organs removed to save her life. Emin had painted the cancer, her art telling her exactly what she needed to know. The image she is referring to, however, remains surreptitious (it could very well be in the show). But the point remains: art is a tool of discovery, one of unconscious navigation, a way of healing emotional and physical wounds. Without it, where would we be?

*

I’m lying in bed looking out the window at the dying trees and the wet ground. The dampness of North London with its grey skies and constant hum of Blackstock Road, the occasional siren cutting through. My upstairs neighbours are having sex. I can hear them through the ceiling. Really, it’s the bedframe I can hear. The squeaking. The thrusting. I can discern light moans and exclamations of pleasure. I think they’ve finished now. It’s more silent. Quiet conversation interspersed with nothingness. I’m lying in bed thinking about how lonely I feel, how my partner should have moved into the flat by now, but through various issues, this has yet to happen – seven months and counting. I watch as a droplet runs down the window and I follow its path until it joins a forming pool of others at the base, a collection of vertical paths becoming horizontal. I’m thinking of the work at White Cube, all of us forlorn nudes in bed, either alone or with ghostly partners, all of us watching droplets fall down a surface, but particularly of the titular painting. In it, a dark figure stands engulfed in scarlet, with what could be a pillow carved in blue behind the head, their bodily structure reflecting the arachnidesque mass to the left. Below, where the legs should reside, Emin’s script emerges as a diary entry on the bedding, taking up the lower third of the image, ending with the words “Like the sad haunted soul that I am I FOLLOWED YOU to THE END”. I decide to take a shower and wash my hair (I just wet it), but it makes me feel better. I go back to the bedroom and see a bloodstain on my pillow. I think I had a nosebleed last night. There’s a stain of myself on my sheets.

The bed is a remarkable object. Nothing in the house is imbued with as much energy – it is the arena of life. We are born, we sleep, love, cry, fuck, dream, and despair in a bed. We are sick in one too. Then, we die within its four corners. The bed harbours memories and illuminates the nervousness of them, where they become ghosts that inhabit, not only our minds, but the space where those experiences took place; it exists as one of the most private spaces within the confines of the house, a totalitarian field of experience. For better or worse. The site of the bed litters Emin’s oeuvre from sculptural works being quite literally her bed, to paintings of figures resting, sleeping, copulating, and now, bleeding in them.

Her magnum opus, My Bed, evokes a crisis which unfolded over four days of her falling in and out of consciousness, sex, and heavy drinking. Emin speaks of how this bed sustained her, keeping her safe from the ground below, covered in cigarette ash, used condoms, empty bottles, and its disarray of scattered paraphernalia. Her painted beds offer this same relief. The nudes are held above the floor, given some level of comfort, bedsheets and bedframes cocooning around them, securing them from the outside, even when they are twisting in agony and their viscera are pouring from their bodies. The bed as phenomenological object is so present in Western contemporary art – from the works of Yoko Ono, to Whiteread, Gonzalez-Torres, and Akunyili Crosby – it continues to be a universal location of artist and viewer, and Emin’s beds are no different, being the setting for agony and isolation, they also act as sites of love and connection (however fleeting). As Harry Weller, Emin’s studio director, puts it, writing about her show Lovers Grave, “he was there and then he was erased”. In these new paintings of figures reclining, there are times when the accompanying body is painted out, leaving a trace as a lover always does. Take, for example, the work The Saddest Tomb, an image of a couple in embrace, a downpour of grey droplets, acting as tears or rain, cascade down the surface towards the writhing sea below. What a turbulent, melancholy scene. The embracing partner’s face has been washed away in an outbreak of brushstrokes because, as I’m sure you’ve realised, he’s gone. He’s not there. My partner isn’t here. I feel myself in this painting and its continual weeping. Of both feeling the body of a lover and its absence.

I wonder how many tear-dampened pillows, how many blood-stained mattresses are out there. How many longing, desperate souls there are, craving an outstretched hand, slowly stroking their back as they fall asleep? Annie Ernaux said, “being alive is being caressed, being touched”, and Emin agrees to a point. But being alive is also to experience everything on a spectrum, and within that exists shit we find painfully difficult. Nevertheless, we’re still alive. Emin’s show is a tableau profoundly offering the hidden (or not so hidden) scenarios unfolding, at one point or another, in all our lives. On first viewing, one may not necessarily ‘connect’ with them, only to undoubtedly unearth themselves from the drips sooner or later. Although a voice of a single person, Emin offers transtemporal clarity, connecting us all to each other via acrylic on canvas, and to ourselves – past, present, maybe even future.

*

I find myself crying more recently. It doesn’t take much to set me off: a film, a note in a song, a mangy pigeon, a long time between texts. Have I pissed them off? Are they going to end things? Do I follow them to the end? To the end of what? The relationship? The world? Life? Love? Do I follow their movements on my iPhone, tracing their every step from work to their house, to the gym, and supermarket? Do I follow them to be close, or do I follow them to find something which may or may not be happening, which I may or may not want to know?

Have a bath, they say, it’ll help calm you down; you can wash everything away. In, I Kept Crying, a figure stretches in a blue rectangle, hastily painted, so to suggest some kind of crypt. Her head is distorted in aggressive layers of paint, of blues and blacks, is that red in there too? Just lingering on what could have been the cheek. Her breasts lay flat on her torso below one of the two taps flanking the rim of the tub, while her limbs dissolve into the side of the bath, falling beneath the water, circling down the drain. From her groin, a gush of red, she’s bleeding into the water, into what should be cleansing her. Does she care? Probably not, she’s too busy crying.

I prefer showers.

What is a bath (or shower) in the throes of emotional upheaval than pure respite? A place of downright privacy, the bathroom door closed (maybe locked), the sounds of the running water drowning out the inhabitant inside. With all the tribulations inscribed in I Kept Crying, there is a moment of hope. Above the bath, a field of whitish blue and pink tiles form a cloudlike edifice over the weeping nude, showing them a way forward. Still, the entirety of the bath/figure composition is covered in dripping paint, like the taps are on full blast. The body must fight out of the emotional drowning, this forest of fluids, to reach the ecstasy of the sky above. How often have we found ourselves in this scenario, unsure how to process some tragic event in our lives, seeking refuge in the sanctuary of the bathroom? On view in this image is the internal emotions becoming external (via the tears and blood) and also the longing of a life which has been passing through one’s open hand, and the reality unfolding before one’s very eyes, rushing out of the taps. Oh, but fear not, there is always hope. Emin assures us of this.

*

I keep looking at Emin’s paintings, trying to find some solution in them, as if she’s a seer or knows anything about me, hoping that the longer I stare at these images, the more likely they will rip themselves open and divulge an experiential truth. Eventually, I think (I hope), I will find myself in Why Was I Crying. But who knows?

This is the beauty of Tracey Emin. Her art is not only autobiographical but also psychological studies of living a life with all its pitfalls and masterful summits. It’s easy to get lost in her marks, and splashes of paint, to the point where you are not only seeing the figure Emin has made, but yourself. Or your lover, mother, sister, daughter, friend, a stranger. Really, what these works are is a testament to the power of art, its catharsis and embrace, with their sweeping displays of trauma, fear, love, longing, distance, closeness, survival, understanding, isolation, domesticity, fragility, pain; the list goes on and on. I’ll leave you to fill in the rest. Art continues; it never abandons, even when everything else in a life is falling apart.