I’ve always had a bit of a problem with our Tracey; the calculated banality of her work, the lippy loutishness,  the seeming only desire to  shock. After Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (1917) and Piero Manzoni’s ‘Artist’s Shit,’(1961) why was anyone getting even remotely worked up about her bed and its sordid accoutrements? And so, like a great many other people, I paired her off with Damien Hirst to play Elizabeth to his Paul as the new Enfants Terribles of the decadent, modern art world.

It’s clear from the moment you set foot inside her retrospective show, A Second Life, at Tate Modern, that Tracy Emin has lived her life out loud from the very beginning. While others might bottle up their abuse, their trauma (and their operation scars) or perhaps sequester them in the pages of a secret diary, Tracey writes them out in capitals in an untidy hand or stitches them together painstakingly and puts a big, fat picture frame around the whole, sorry shebang. Those of us who grew up learning not to wear our hearts on our sleeves might see this as an affront.

To many of the visitors to Tate Modern when I toured Ms Emin’s exhibition however, it seemed positively cathartic.

When rape or violence or disease silenced them, here’s someone who fearlessly and noisily articulated their own pain for them. Every embroidered letter requires a host of pin pricks, does it not? The paint on Emin’s awkwardly articulated nudes drizzles down the canvas like blood. And if you want to see that bed (and let me tell you, you really do), you have to first run the gauntlet of a darkened corridor, lined with photos of her bleeding stoma, following radical treatment for bladder cancer.

The Last of the Gold, 2002

Now, when we look at My Bed (1998), what comes across isn’t wilful or cynical, or egoistic, it’s  courageous. Emin may have the loudest voice in the room, but it’s also the most vulnerable.

I never Asked to Fall in Love – You made me Feel like This, 2018; The End of Love, 2024

As for my own reservations about her artistic skill, I realised that these were based, erroneously, on the idea that I actually knew what art was. After ‘A Second Life,’ I’ve come to realise that before I even pick up a paintbrush, I need to ask myself what I think art is and ask myself that very same question every day.