When Tracey Emin was thirteen, one day, an older boy walked her home from a school disco. She came back with ripped tights and muddy clothes, telling her mother, ‘I’m not a virgin anymore.’ Years later, she would say she had ‘no memory of being a virgin’1 — a reflection of a turbulent youth that left her with a complex relationship with femininity and sexuality.Emin was born in London in 1963 to a Turkish Cypriot father and an English mother, and grew up in Margate with her twin brother and mother. Her childhood was marked by instability as the collapse of her parents’ business left the family in chronic financial difficulty; her father divided his time between Emin’s family and his other family — the woman he was legally married to and their children.2 In her late teens and twenties, Emin experienced two pregnancies, both of which ended in abortion.3Before her career in contemporary art, Emin studied fashion in Rochester, but never finished her degree. She then studied Printmaking at Maidstone Art College and later earned a Master’s in Painting at the Royal College of Art.4 In April 1989, as Emin was finding her artistic voice, Barbara Kruger’s artwork Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground) appeared prominently on placards at the March for Women’s Equality and Women’s Lives, a landmark demonstration that drew tens of thousands to Washington DC.5 Kruger’s image (a woman’s face split into positive and negative photographic exposures and overlaid with the words ‘Your Body Is a Battleground’ in bold text) represented a protest against a new wave of anti-abortion legislation threatening women’s reproductive rights in the United States.Kruger’s work represented a recent, radical strand within feminist art, a movement that had emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. Feminist art itself built upon earlier feminist activism: first-wave feminism, notably the suffrage campaigns of the early 20th century, and second-wave feminism in the 1960s, which broadened feminist discourse to include abortion rights, contraception, and workplace equality.Feminist artists active in this era used their work to confront socio-political issues directly. Kruger’s provocative approach exemplified this activist spirit, transforming art into a vehicle for political protest. For younger artists like Emin, who came of age amid these widely felt socio-political tensions, feminist art offered both an opportunity for expression, but also a challenging legacy that could feel distant.The late 1980s also saw the emergence of a new generation of artists known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who radically altered Britain's contemporary art scene with their provocative works. The group became renowned for their media-savvy flair and strong entrepreneurial spirit — qualities that aligned neatly with the values of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Many of the YBAs, including Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths between 1987 and 1990. They gained their first major exposure in the 1988 exhibition Freeze, organised by Hirst in an abandoned building in London’s Docklands.The group soon attracted the attention of Charles Saatchi, an art collector and advertising magnate, whose patronage gave them critical legitimacy and market appeal. Beginning in 1992, Saatchi organised a series of influential exhibitions titled Young British Artists. Saatchi had previously commissioned Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (‘Shark’; 1991), which became one of the defining artworks of 1990s Britain.Emin, too, became associated with the YBAs through her provocative art.6 Yet her relationship with the group remains complex, resisting easy categorisation; she once remarked, ‘Who wants to be remembered as just a YBA artist?’7Her own work came into focus with her 1995 installation, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995. Here, Emin employs quilting (a craft traditionally associated with femininity) to catalogue every person she has ‘slept with’. The artwork consists of a tent, its surface covered in appliquéd fabric letters spelling out names, including that of her former partner, Billy Childish, which appears prominently at the entrance. Emin deliberately includes people with whom she has literally shared a bed, such as family members and close friends, broadening the meaning of intimacy beyond sexual encounters. The artwork creates both a physical enclosure and an emotional experience: viewers may enter the tent physically, immersing themselves in Emin’s intimate personal history.Emin achieved international recognition following her installation My Bed (1998) at the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize exhibition, the annual showcase of shortlisted artists for one of Britain’s most prominent awards for contemporary visual art. The prize frequently draws significant media attention, helping to raise the profile of artists, many of whom have explored political or social themes in their work. My Bed featured cigarettes, condoms, used tissues, alcohol bottles, dirty clothes, and a pregnancy test. The scene represented the aftermath of a painful breakup, starkly capturing a state of emotional distress and in doing so challenged conventional representations of femininity. Emin’s public display of intimate details from her private life expressed a radical honesty that would resonate widely with the public.Thematically and at its core, Emin’s work emphasises personal narrative and introspection. While her work indeed deals with themes central to the female experience, Emin engages with those themes using an autobiographical and confessional style, developing a profoundly personal commentary. In this way, she neither aligns with radical feminist art nor the flamboyance of the YBAs. The autobiographical element develops a coherent narrative within her work, one in which her personal experiences and female struggles are shown without a filter. Through this candid portrayal, Emin is able to articulate the complexities of how trauma affected her as a woman. The bodily engagement demanded by works such as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With represents Emin’s active reclamation of her past, and resistance to societal attitudes that impose guilt on those actions. In recent years, Emin’s art has explored her experience of cancer diagnosis and its aftermath: treatment and recovery. In There Was Blood (2022), which depicts a love-making couple where blood has seeped into the bedding, the centrality of personal experience to Emin’s art is clearer than ever — even as she confronts her own mortality.