Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin grew up in Margate, a seaside town in Kent, and nearly everything she makes starts there: her childhood, her relationships, her body. She works in drawing, film, needlework, neon, sculpture and paint.

Most people know her for My Bed. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999, she showed her own unmade bed at the Tate Gallery, exactly as she had left it after several days of feeling suicidal over a break-up: stained sheets, empty cigarette packets, used underwear. The tabloids were outraged. In 2014 it sold at Christie’s for just over £2.5 million.

Her relationship with painting is the less familiar story. She took an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in 1989, then destroyed everything she had made there. In 1996 she shut herself in a gallery for two weeks with blank canvases to make peace with the medium. By the mid-2000s she was painting again, quick purple washes of her own body. In 2007 she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, and in 2020 the Royal Academy hung her work beside Edvard Munch, one of her early influences.

That same year she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Surgery left her with a stoma, which she has since put into her work. Tate Modern’s “A Second Life” (February to August 2026) was the largest survey she has had. Start with Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), a short Super 8 film in which she tells the story of her teenage years in Margate.