The House | “Hugely emotional”: the Earl of Clancarty reviews ‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’

1996, Tracey Emin: ‘Exorcism of the last painting I ever made’ | Image © Tracey Emin

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As I started to walk around the new Tracey Emin exhibition, Tracey Emin: A Second Life at Tate Modern, curiously my first thought (and one that kept coming back) was about framing.

Emin is an artist (and a very self-conscious one) who has mined her life and the things her life consists of, for art, as art. She will frame anything and everything if it fits into one of the many ‘stories’ that make up the totality of her work.

A trip to the dentist inspires her piece My Future (1993) in which she frames an old passport (a past identity), a tooth and the dentist’s card (both in the same frame) and separately a hand-written lyrical text that ends with the line “That’s the last dead thing that leaves my body” – a reference to her abortions. 

Everything is framed, one way or another: the large, impressive and beautifully composed appliqué blankets are mounted in thick white frames. Even the famous My Bed is framed twice: by what is left out around the bed and the bedside rug, turning the bed into a lonely ‘oasis’ of being, as well as the line you as the viewer cannot cross. That and her studio installation feel, then, a little like crime scenes, though less perhaps about the crime, more about the potential loss of the fragile evidence.

But perhaps the most interesting framing is that of the paintings which, in an exhibition of varied media, are the dominant medium – and clearly the work Emin has most thrown herself into in recent years.

The newest largescale paintings have metal frames leaving just a slight gap between painting and frame. This interesting aesthetic choice adds to the sense of the severe physical limitation placed on the ideals and emotions you sense in the painting: freedom, ecstasy, joy and sexual desire in the face of anger and latterly the fight against death. The paintings that work best – such as Rape (2018) and You Keep Fucking Me (2024) – do so when the face-off between freedom and obstruction (or erasure) feels most acute. 

Emin’s work is full of such contradictions and ambiguities. Her embroidered cotton Why (2009) contains the phrase “Why Be Afraid”, which may start out as consolation but, when persistently repeated, turns into a cry of fear itself – as well as the cold analysis of the fact.

Her brilliant Super 8 film Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), rightly given a room of its own, lingers nostalgically over a timeless Margate, with its beach and seaside attractions, even as her voiceover tells us the town is too small and it is time to leave.

She never became a dancer because she was called a “slag” on the dancefloor, but she also never became a dancer because she became an artist, even as much of the film is devoted to her dancing. The artist returned to Margate, but on her own terms.

This is a hugely emotional exhibition. If there is one fault, it is nothing to do with the artist but the stupid trigger warnings. They should all be gathered up, framed and put in a room by themselves. Almost Tracey Emin.

Earl of Clancarty is a Crossbench peer

Tracey Emin: A Second Life

Curated by: Maria Balshaw, Alvin Li and Jess Baxter

Venue: Tate Modern until 31 August 2026