I Never Stopped Loving You is the title of a neon work by Dame Tracey Emin. It’s installed on the facade of Droit House, a former customs bureau on the eastern end of Margate, the seaside town on the Kent coast of England, where Emin grew up. It was created in 2010, when she was living in London, enjoying a glitzy career as a celebrated YBA, the moniker given to the Young British Artists who took the art world by storm in the 1990s. The work was a hometown homage, a tribute to a faraway past.
A decade and a half later, Emin is as shocked as anyone that the piece now symbolizes something much more personal and present. After watching her mother die in Margate in 2016, and surviving a gruesome battle with bladder cancer in 2020, Emin, 61, moved back home, and not just as a regular resident. She opened up a studio, invested in local businesses, and created two artist residencies.
Emin’s first purchase, in 2017, was an old printing press building, which she made into a house (complete with a swimming pool) that connects to her large painting studio and a facility that archives both her own work and work by others that she has collected. In 2021, she acquired Margate’s former public baths and renovated them into TKE Studios (Emin’s middle name is Karima), which offers space to professional artists, as well as TEAR, the Tracey Emin Artist Residency, which provides studios and learning experiences for emerging artists. She became the proprietor of the Constitution, a former bar that she emptied, whitewashed, and transformed into a space where she plans future -exhibitions. She acquired what was once the town morgue and gave it to Lee Coad, a local restaurateur, for a training kitchen called The Perfect Place to Grow, named after one of her works, which has a program designed to provide 18- to 24-year-olds with the skills for a culinary career. (Coad owns two restaurants, Dory’s and Angela’s, which are favorite haunts of Emin’s.)
In the past five years, Emin has welcomed 17 artists in residence in Margate, as part of TEAR. Two years ago, she purchased a 30,000-square-foot -pavilion located on the beach and plans to turn it into public showers, lockers, a café, and additional artist studios; there will also be a clubhouse and a stage for live events. She’s currently renovating a row of three Georgian townhouses, where she plans to live and keep an archive of papers and photographs. And this past January, she opened a second residency, called Victoria House, which has hosted two artists so far.
Behind a work table, Emin’s painting There Is an End to Everything, 2024.
“She is the most courageous person I know—deeply committed to her community and passionate about making a difference,” says Clarrie Wallis, the director of the Turner Contemporary, the art museum in town, named after the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner. “Her energy has transformed Margate.” Carl Freedman, a longtime friend and former London gallerist who relocated to Margate around the same time as Emin, agrees. “Tracey is not just interested in helping artists; she wants to help a whole town,” he says. “It’s rare that someone gives both their time and financial backing to a social project of this scale.”
Emin likes to work from the “boffice,” which is how she refers to her bedroom when she’s horizontal and reading, sketching, or taking meetings and calls. It’s where she begins our interview and photo shoot, welcoming her friend the photographer Juergen Teller while her cats, Teacup and Pancake, groom themselves on pillows beside her. “I’m in bed until 12 o’clock, at least. I rest a lot, because if I don’t, I get ill,” she says, adjusting a pair of pajamas she got on a long-haul flight.
Emin couldn’t wait to leave home in 1978, when she was 15, and later studied at the Maidstone College of Art, in Kent, and the Royal College of Art, in London. The early days were hardscrabble and included bouts of homelessness, but her blunt, honest, raw autobiographical work cut through in the mid-’90s. This included Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a blue tent with the names of 102 people with whom she had shared a bed, including lovers, her grandmother, and her mother. The installation that definitively put her on the map was 1998’s My Bed, which consisted of Emin’s own unmade bed surrounded by condoms, vodka bottles, dirty underwear, and cigarette butts. (It came up at auction in 2014 and sold for more than £2.5 million.) She was nominated for a Turner Prize in 1999, and her work was acquired by the Tate Modern, in London; MoMA and the Guggenheim, in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Pompidou, in Paris.
Emin’s parents owned a hotel in Margate, which wasn’t a success. She has a twin brother, Paul, who lives in Broadstairs, a neighboring town. But it was her mother’s terminal cancer, more than four decades after Emin had left, that transformed her relationship with her hometown. “I got the phone call saying ‘You’ve got to come now to say goodbye’ at four in the morning,” she says. “I drove down, got here at six, and there was this big, giant rainbow coming over the beach and looking right at me.” She apologizes for sounding corny. “When I realized that my mum was actually going to die, I knew I couldn’t say goodbye to Margate.”
A work in development in the studio.
Her mother passed away four days later. Emin and Freedman each put up £350,000 for a derelict group of buildings “full of asbestos and covered in pigeon shit,” says Emin. Renovations took four years. “I planned to live in London and come here for long weekends.” Plans changed after her own cancer diagnosis, in 2020.
How did she find out she was ill? “Because I wanted to have sex,” she says, explaining that she had chosen to be celibate for 10 years. “I went to my gynecologist to make sure everything was working down there.” The exam happened during the Covid lockdown, so she and the gynecologist were both wearing masks. Yet Emin could see it in the doctor’s eyes: bad news. She was sent out for scans, which revealed advanced squamous cell carcinoma on her bladder. One specialist gave her six months to live.
Four weeks later, after a seven-and-a-half-hour surgery, her bladder, uterus, urethra, a portion of her colon, some lymph nodes, and half her vagina were gone. “Just before I went down, the doctor asked, ‘Is there anything you need to say before you go into surgery?’ And I said, ‘Yes. Please, if you can, keep my clitoris.’ When I woke up, I came round and he goes, ‘You’re going to go back to sleep again in a minute. I just want to tell you, you still have your clitoris.’ ” Keeping the organ helped Emin retain an idea of feminine normalcy. But for the rest of her life, she will use a urostomy pouch and urinate through a stoma that was surgically created on the right side of her torso.
Her physical strength has been diminished, but her creativity flourishes in Margate. “I work really hard. I work nonstop,” she says. Her studio is packed with enormous canvases that feature figure drawings, personal and visceral, in hues that look like blood. “I’m doing more than I ever thought I would or could.” In March, she debuted two important shows: “Sex and Solitude,” at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, was her first major institutional exhibition in Italy; “I Loved You Until Morning,” at the Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, marked her first outing in an American museum. Early next year, she will have a solo presentation at Tate Modern, in London.
“When I get angry with myself because I can’t do what I want to do, I just have to remember that I’m living without an organ,” says Emin. “Only 30 percent of people survive what I’ve been through.” The cancer is now in remission; her doctor calls her Miracle Woman.
The week before my Margate visit, Emin was awarded an honorary doctorate from Canterbury Christ Church University at Canterbury Cathedral. Before the proceedings, she was sitting with the dean, discussing whether there was an afterlife. “Have I been given a second life? Or maybe I died before, and now I’ve come back and this is my new life?” she asked him.
Emin and Teacup in her “boffice,” the bedroom/office where she rests, sketches, and takes calls.
During the ceremony, she talked about the power of art through human history. “When the cave people were painting on the caves, they weren’t clubbing each other to death,” she told students. “Art is essentially one of the most beautiful things that mankind can do. It is of an elevated, peaceful nature that is from the inner parts of our soul.”
I suggest that this is a surprising sentiment from someone who early critics accused of being disruptive. “Who was I disruptive with?” she shoots back. “Tell me who you think I was disruptive with!”
With the art world, the “system”? I ask. Her early works screamed about things one didn’t talk about, like assault, rape, and abortions. “I still talk about them,” she says, smirking. “So, what? Has the system caught up with me? Now loads of female artists are making work about abortion and painting about it. I wish they’d been talking about it 30 years ago because we might have actually been able to have a much stronger hold on things now.”
Her archives are full of fan letters. “I used to get them from women in prison, single mums who had abortions, suicidal people,” says Emin. “They’d write, ‘Thank you, your work’s really helped me,’ or ‘I never understood art until your work. Now I’ve started looking at art in a different way.’ ” More recently, she’s been getting these kinds of messages on Instagram. “I was making art for people who weren’t necessarily from the art establishment. That meant that certain echelons of the art establishment didn’t like me. They didn’t like the way I spoke. They didn’t like my attitude. They certainly didn’t like the way I swore. They didn’t like my fuck-you attitude,” says Emin, grinning. “But the people liked me. The people liked me because I was speaking their language.”
How does it feel to be planning her posthumous existence? “I feel like a great Egyptian,” she says, joking that Margate is her pyramid. “Most people don’t do it till they’re 70, 80. But I was going to die. I don’t have any children. I’m not married. I don’t have an extended family that I take care of or anything.”
She initially used her own savings to acquire the properties in Margate, then created the Tracey Emin Foundation. In 2022, she sold a painting, Like a Cloud of Blood, to build its endowment. It was one of the first she made following her illness, and it went for over £2.3 million at Christie’s.
Emin and her cat Teacup, with another work in progress.
Harry Weller is Emin’s shadow. He signed up for a two-week internship 16 years ago and never left. Currently, his title is creative director, but “right-hand man will do,” he says. Before Emin’s move to Margate, her studio employed 16 people. Now it’s just Weller, who curates Emin’s shows, manages the archive and her press and charity requests, coordinates image rights and pricing, and looks after all the other elements of her career. “You name it!” he says, laughing. “I am the only person present when she paints, pushing or challenging her.” Emin trusts him to run the business in order for her to focus on the foundation, her health, and supporting the next generation of artists.
Elissa Cray is the director of TKE Studios, the Tracey Emin Artist Residency, and Victoria House Residency. Together with Emin, she combs through hundreds of requests for TEAR’s program. Applicants have come from Uganda, Hungary, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, -Russia, and the U.S.
Weller is inspired by watching Emin. “After her passing, this initiative will be self-sustaining and will continue to support artists. Her personal studio will transform into a museum with rotating exhibitions of her work. Her house will remain unchanged for visitors to experience. All of it is intended to honor her legacy, benefit Margate, and support more artists.”
Surviving cancer and moving to Margate drew a line in Emin’s life. “Before, I was lonely. I lived in London’s East End. I had no trees, no nature. I cut a lonely walk to my studio. I wasn’t surrounded by artistic people. I had no close friends next to me,” she says. “Now I live in a town that I’ve known all my life, that makes me feel familiar and at ease. I love the architecture, I love the sea, and I have wonderful moments just being alone. On top of that, I’ve got one of my oldest friends in the whole world, Carl, right next door, and he happens to have a gallery.” She has her cats, which appear in many of her paintings. She works with the residents; she curates their shows.
“Now, with my second life, I’m living. The other one is dead,” she says, holding a mug in the boffice. “Look around: I’ve gone to heaven.”
First Photo Assistant: Felipe Chaves; Postproduction: Louwre Erasmus at Quickfix.