‘My Bed’ Revisited: Celebrating Tracey Emin and being a woman ‘on the edge’.
By Ana Lazarut
Running from the 27th of February to the 31st of August, ‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’ exhibits new multimedia works by Tracey Emin alongside Emin’s iconically controversial installation from 1998, titled ‘My Bed’. This installation consists of a lived-in bed with dishevelled sheets, condom wrappers, empty vodka, and discarded undergarments. Such an iconic work cemented Tracey Emin’s position as a pioneer in redefining what art could be and as a creator of a “historic moment in British culture and global art history” [1].
By converging the personal and the public through the renewed piece, Emin retains her relevance and importance not only to the art world but also to modern pop culture. Such a well-known work of art, with a legacy that reaches even my rural secondary-school art classroom twenty-five years after its first exhibition, demonstrates how Emin’s confrontational and raw style of art retains significance for its audiences.
I remember my art teacher bringing up the image on the projector slide and asking a class of tired seventeen-year-olds who had sat through two hours of prehistoric art lessons what they thought of this bed. Some hated it and could not understand why a destroyed bed was taking up space in an art museum, and some loved it and thought it was what art was supposed to be. Most notable, however, was that it provoked every single one of us, and we all responded to the piece. Divided as we were in our opinions about ‘My Bed’, we were all provoked by it and responded in a visceral way.
This re-exhibition then brings a re-visitation of the feelings not only seventeen-year-old me felt about My Bed, but in a more mature manner, due to the piece’s pairing with paintings and installations depicting Tracey Emin’s cancer diagnosis, and later recovery, which resulted in Emin losing her bladder, ovaries, lymph nodes, part of her vagina, part of her intestine, and her urethra. In an interview with Colostomy UK, Tracey reflected on her diagnosis and having to confront death:
“[…] the worst thing about finding out you have cancer is that it hits you and you’re scared. You don’t know if you’re gonna die, you don’t know if you’re gonna live. Everyone who is diagnosed with cancer has to go through that.” [2]
Having to function and continue living your life whilst facing death every day is no simple task, and Emin’s found an outlet for the nightmare she faced through her art, exhibited without borders in ‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’.
The confronting nature of Emin’s work remains, with one reviewer fondly remarking, “that’s our Trace” after visiting the exhibit in the Tate [3]. And I, although limited in my experience of Emin’s artwork, also possess a fond attachment to the remarkable woman who, no matter what, continues to create art that is true to her personal experience, no matter how uncomfortable such a public display makes people feel.
I felt the need to delve deeper into Emin’s psyche following my revisitation of her art and thought what better way to do it than by going through her Instagram account – the place where the personal becomes a public performance of identity. It was through this online sleuthing that I learnt the most about Tracey and her rituals, routines, and politics.
In many of her posts, Emin eulogises her mother, whom she lost in 2016. There is something about the immortalisation of her mother both online and in her art, but I’m not sure what. It feels beyond me to name and define, but I feel it, and Tracey does too:
“Today I have been sitting quietly with the late winter, early spring sun on my face, my babies Teacup and Pancake curled up cosy next to me.
Memories of hugging my Mum goodbye at her door. Waving goodbye to her, from the street below.
Beeping my horn as I drove past her little comfy flat. Taking a glance as she waves bye-bye, Remembering her smile.
Happy Mother’s Day Mum, wherever you are… 🤍” [4]
Whilst celebrating becoming the first contemporary artist to be showcased alongside Edvard Munch, Tracey reflects, “My little bed and my life have gone a long way in the last 23 years.. Nothing is wasted, and nothing is lost.” [5]
Most of all, however, Emin details the reality of living with a stoma and how it has impacted her outlook on life, and by extension, her art. In a photo of herself on a beach, sporting her swimsuit and stoma submerged under a shower, she notes:
“We all have to find ways to feel alive.
And stay alive.” [6]
This caption impacts me the greatest, in a manner similar to that of My Bed. It is both deeply personal to her experience and universally felt. I feel a sudden sense that I am invading her privacy, as though I am looking into her bedroom and how she lives and begin to feel as though I am engaging in a voyeuristically violating act.
My discomfort stems from the boundary between personal and performance being broken by social media’s intrinsic ability to blur the lines between what is fake and what is real. As Tracey herself stated, “there is nothing fake about my vulnerability” and defined herself as “a woman on the edge” [7]. I think I was expecting some Virgin Mary-esque idolised figure before I delved into her Instagram page; still, the honesty of her vulnerability had a seismic effect on me across the Irish Sea, in Belfast.
Emin’s ability to confront through the deeply personal and have it transformed into a universally felt sentiment of being a woman on the edge is precisely what her reworked exhibition displays, and the impact persists in remaining almost thirty years on from the first inception.
Sources:
[1] Tate Modern, 2026, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/tracey-emin
[2] Emin, Tracey, 2023, https://www.colostomyuk.org/if-i-ask-for-a-different-type-of-chair-people-think-im-being-a-diva-exclusive-tracey-emin-on-living-with-a-stoma/
[3] Frankel, Eddy, 2026, The Guardian, https://www.colostomyuk.org/if-i-ask-for-a-different type-of-chair-people-think-im-being-a-diva-exclusive-tracey-emin-on-living-with-a-stoma/
[4] @traceyeminstudio, Instagram, 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DV6I0C6jJ-W/
[5] @traceyeminstudio, Instagram, 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/CVVG_9woEsK/
[6] @traceyeminstudio, Instagram, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C3DvWMPoya2/
[7] Emin, Tracey, 2018, @guelmemisart, Instagram, 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DVZDqGojQTj/
