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Meand a photo she took shortly after being diagnosed with squamous cell bladder cancer in 2020, Tracey Emin’s iPhone covers her right breast as our vision descends from the catheter to her urostomy bag to her discarded curves. His body is fragile in this hospital mirror, but his vision is not good. It looks like we’re dead in our eyes as he says: It’s important, this is important – a certainty that challenges the idea of subordination during illness.
Even now, six years after her life-saving surgery, Emin refuses to agree with what may, or may not, make us comfortable with her post-surgery body image. As well as losing her bladder, Emin also lost her uterus, ovaries, lymph nodes, part of her intestines, her urethra and part of her penis. And yet she has found independence in documenting her body changes. “This is mine, I have it,” he confirmed in an interview shortly after surgery.
It’s a phrase I repeated, like a mantra, in my hospital bed after my colectomy in 2023. And it was out of respect for Emin that I took pictures of my body while I was recovering at home. In one photo, taken two weeks after my surgery, my right hand lifts up my jumper to reveal a swollen and bruised stomach underneath – the curves are folded down to reveal her surgical scars. In other words, my camera sits on the tail of a type IV that runs on my left arm.
Would I have taken these pictures if it weren’t for Emin? Maybe not. In the weeks leading up to my life-saving surgery, I became increasingly fixated on the ways in which her unframed Polaroids, like her blanket squares, encourage us to look at her in ways we might not like. Twenty-seven years after his sculpture My Bed made him famous in the late 1990s, Emin is still forcing us to accept the things we tend to ignore. Only these days his bleeding genitals focus on the existence of invisible disabilities and what Harry Weller, director of Emin’s studio, calls “his struggle to exist”.
“Back in the 90s, people used to say it was art,” Emin recently mused to Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate. It just wasn’t like that. “I didn’t reveal anything to anyone,” he corrected his former critics — and perhaps his current fans. I thought about Emin’s important transformation a few weeks ago when I visited his famous exhibition at Tate Modern and thinking about his paintings 2023, I saw myself dying and living. In it, his crimson body is strewn on a table, watched over by a black death cloak, and his mother’s ashes are in a casket behind her bloody hair. Like most of Emin’s art, this painting doesn’t want us to look at it in a particular way – it just stands on its own, and that’s what makes it physically visible. The same can be said for her 2024 painting Barbed Wire Stitches in which her white thighs are split like two rocky cliffs to reveal the black stitches between them.
Call it visceral, call it human. But, like Emin, I struggle with the word “acceptance” when it comes to women’s descriptions of what has happened to them. The meaning is that there is something that makes a woman guilty and ashamed to express herself in her life and her art. As if to do that, he should ask for forgiveness. Only Emin has not subscribed to this falsehood. Come to think of it, neither did he Frida Kahlo during her very short life (Kahlo died when she was only 47) – another historic artist whose portrait will be on display at Tate Modern next month.
A booming Mexican export, Kahlo, whose magical visions began in the paralyzing months after a tram crashed into her bus in 1925; a metal rail that slams into her abdomen and protrudes from her genitals, breaking her spine, collar and pelvis, and severely damaging her reproductive organs. In the following months, his parents placed a mirror on the ceiling of his bed so that he could see himself, and he could see him with the help of his palette. It was an act of liberation that one can see in his 1932 painting My Birth – a surrealist image of the birth of Kahlo and his fetus entwined – in which the act of giving birth becomes Kafkaesque in the way of the mother with her head covered and her child’s lifeless body sat between splayed legs and blood. Yes, it’s bad, but – like Emin’s selfie almost 90 years later – it’s real. How we choose to interact with both of them tells us a lot about how willing we are to accept the reality of their bodies – and what words.
As Kahlo’s biographer Hayden Herrera noted in 1983, Kahlo’s art has a power and strength “that can hold viewers in awe”. We can see it for ourselves in his 1944 painting, The Broken Column: a strong image of eternal pain that evokes Saint Sebastian’s painting of the Christian faith. Only in Kahlo’s death, her nailed nose, like a broken desert behind her, is cut open to show us the red blood inside her, a broken jawline that closes on her chin to become as hard as stone.
With an anatomical eye on her wounds, Kahlo also painted what she called “body space” for her purposes, which made her disability an infinite thing, a religious work that helped her to transform her daily experience of unbearable pain into something extraordinary. And I think the same can be said about Emin.
“What would he do if he had children?” Emin wrote about Kahlo in 2005. “Also, what if he didn’t face the next disaster?” Questions we know still haunt Emin’s work as they did Kahlo’s. For all artists of various artistic backgrounds, it is their personal experiences – of illness, disability, miscarriage and abortion – that have come to count on canvas. And that’s what has brought me closer to them as I’ve been going through my health challenges lately – multiple surgeries and more to come.
Twenty years after being diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and three years after my colon cancer diagnosis, it is to these artists that I return more than any other to strengthen my self-representation, and strengthen my understanding of the meaning of carrying light and darkness in my body story. I see resistance and liveliness in Emin’s bleeding portraits. I see the pink body of the watermelon in Kahlo’s 1953 painting Fruta de la Vida and how it contrasts with the red marks of the artist’s wounds. And I see how art can be an answer to pain – a way to recognize when the body turns.
