Women on display: Tracy Emin, Nan Goldin, Sarah Kane
July, 2026
A visit to the Tate afforded me the chance to appreciate some of Tracy Emin’s compelling video work which stood out to me on both of my visits to her retrospective ‘Second Life’. She is most famously associated with the bed which has limited shock value. A mix of my 3 year art uni experience and a depressive episode finds this chamber scenario benignly familiar… However, Emin has always attested to what I believe a good artist to be: a person able to impactfully articulate stories in a medium in a way that both connects with and nourishes my understanding of what it means to be human. In this sense, her work speaks for me and to me, and she is extremely great at revealing stories and accounts in a way that I cannot stop listening to. It is her video works, such as ‘Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995)’ and ‘How it Feels (1996)’ here, which strike my gut even when standing in a small gallery room in front of a projected video, crowded amongst many bodies.
The candid feeling and details imparted by Emin’s lyricism in ‘How it Feels’ is as far removed from whimsy and stifling art world intellectualism as I would hope it to be. What struck me about this unfiltered, real account, was her compelling delivery. Similarly, this interview challenges a mere lecture or presentation in this way, as she says "After my first abortion, I learned more about the essence and knowledge of where things come from than any art college or lecture or anyone could tell me.” This is what gives the first hand account a highly digestible influence. It also reminds me that my own unique traumas and formative experiences have defined my understanding of grey areas, prejudices, and nuances so much.
All art is a self portrait. I guess Emin decidedly makes her own life the starting point when making art; Emin’s oeuvre is inseparable to her experiences, vulnerabilities, and relationships. Her dialogues and words may not pertain to the expected poetic rhythm, but this facilitates a raw and confrontational tone that denotes the piece's success. When sharing art, we inevitably remove skeletons from the closet, and Emin is extremely generous in this. The way she relinquishes beating-around-the-bush provides a refreshingly unmoderated experience. In viewing video works like these, you feel a sense of liberation, as she unearths the still hidden and concealed nuances of social, political, and feminine experiences.
I attribute this continuation of certain restrictive dynamics in society means that her earlier work still withholds impact. Themes expressed in ‘How it Feels’ and ‘Why I Never Became a Dancer’ may feel ostensibly more distant to a progressive western landscape we now find ourselves in. Yet the psychological trauma, prejudice, and moral weight she has faced as a woman - from past abortion to slurs faced on the dancefloor - still relates to our experiences today in that these prejudices remain, even in more secret and obscured ways. This means the juxtaposition of Emin’s confident and confronting recounts hold a bolder contrast, and are, in this way, more illuminating of the harsh reality.
Many moving artworks of this kind find new waves of urgency. Viewing the work of Nan Goldin, I was elicited to think about the controversial potency of her images today in a media landscape which feels ostensibly less private. Visiting her older work at the Grand Palais ‘This Will Not End Well’ didn’t feel like embarking on a visceral journey: of course it was raw and intimate, but the visual did not implant itself into my mind because it was subversive or challenging my perspective. In fact, it remains in my mind filtered into the familiar visual grammar of the 21st Century. The candid exploration, captured in niche subcultures, the marginalised, and the vulnerable, continues to break down the boundaries of ‘the outsider’ and evince a shared humanity. The traumatic, the claustrophobic, and ecstatic is realised, but does not shake me. And this is not because I am ambivalent, I can still find in the work a radical honesty, yet I am desensitized. The selection of major works no longer feel revealing, but conversely jolt me with their reminder of how little is left to reveal now.
What stems from this reaction is that the endless stream of digital intimacy does not reach the same weight as Goldin’s photographs, albeit it does dilute them. It would be remiss of me to regard her photographs as precursors, as this proliferation of the ‘candid’ in the media vacuum fails to achieve the same defining uncanny animation and life of Goldin’s oeuvre.
Goldin’s works are effortlessly intentional in how they portray life. The large scale projection and immersive soundtracks housed in multiple tents inside the gallery space give these slideshows a temporal experience. And here, beyond just space and scale, heightened colour saturation in the photographs is another tool which bypassesses the confines of physical reality to reflect the intensity of emotions- hence, the images are liberated from trying to replicate reality in recording inner truth.
Regarding image proliferation, the work no longer stands alone, but stands within. It sets a precedent for the insistence of seeing, feeling, and bearing witness within the whirlpool of imagery produced today. There is nothing fearful or unexpected, but we are given a reason to be afraid of the imagery it shines out from.
Aligning with this savage beauty was the perception shattering play ‘Cleansed’ (premiered 1998) by the late Sarah Kane, providing a shocking live experience of love and horror. Written by the late tragic emblem, albeit a recent revelation to me, cannot be a piece that I could become desensitised to after 100 run throughs. Characterised by the slippage of play and reality is a subversion completely belittled by the content of the play. This piece draws together a thought-provoking, cadavorous critique within the antithesis structure of multiple torture scenes, prompting walks out, fainting, and first aid emergencies within the audience.
In this regard, exceptional demands of the play exemplifies the cast’s virtuosity in responding to almost inevitable disturbances within the pacing, if anything. I have had this sense of dismay and abhorrence expressed by an interaction I had with a visitor at a Francis Bacon exhibition, surrounded by his iconic tortured figure studies of the late 1940s. Similarly, however much the complexities challenged by the imagery of Kane’s hypnotic freak show recurs to me, I cannot imagine it losing its potency in my mind. While brutal, there are moments in the play which illuminate characters like a biblical Velazquez scene, albeit charged with the chaos of the modern age. At one point, flowers sprout up from beneath the stage as it jitters back, serving with virtuosity a close interpretation of the late author’s original script. With a lemon yellow and amber haze, ecstatic moments like these on stage have the warmth and hope of a Van Gogh sunflower painting. I actually find many thorough lines between Kane and Bacon, as the painter maintained he wanted to produce images of beauty, but that he “would rather have torment than annihilation.”
A boundary I particularly enjoyed was the interchangeability of theatre and contemporary dance, which this production could equally be attributed to both. What makes painters like Bacon remain as conclusively potent as this experience, for me, is the bodily. Everyone has one and everyone has experienced a level of pain which can make even those farthest removed from the travesties played out on the stage feel personally implicated in the mess and destruction. Kane’s characters, Like Bacon's, are also animalised and engaged in conflict, internally and externally. Mutilation is rife. The prop list includes syringes, rods, and … Yet this story is equally spun with a thematic focus on love and loss, which precariously survives. It gives the masses watching these even absurd and abstract scenarios a fundamental linkage. So we can find a grounding in this play that makes the horror it delves into even more stomach churning. This is not arbitrarily gruesome, in this sense, but conscientiously, curiously, darkly human.
I can empathise why many may feel scandalized by this, understandably numbed to meaning belying levels of cruelty in this work. In her work we are met with how the familiar, sentimental, and intimate can be unequivocally dismantled. Conceptually, it echoes a J G Ballard brutality which takes modern reality for more of a stage set “ruled by fictions of every kind,” and likewise Kane adopts the writer’s task to take this fiction and “invent reality.” Kane takes convergences that exist and pushes the extremities of these within an alternative lens, which hones in on what we’d rather suppress and ignore. Yet, with this consistent wave of violence, grief and hope are just as visceral, feelings that are even pushed to more vitality and importance when presented against an adversarial backdrop of escalating butchery.
What illuminated each experience of these three figures' works was the unlikely emotional sensitivity when engaging with the traumatic, adversarial, and absurd. In each of these cases I feel that what presides over the visions is a clear diaristic drive which fails to present itself in the works in cliche ways, such as feministically. Instead, what is realised for me is work which tugs all perspectives, achieving a blend of sociological critique and bold fantasy. It’s akin to how Woolf achieves an androgynous mind to fully capture the human experience, such as in Orlando seamlessly navigating both a male and female perspectivity. You may be able to credit this to the break down of mind and body by the authors of each work, that internally we hold both masculine and feminine faculties
I wonder how many could relate to my enjoyment of dissident genres in art. I find that knowledge and perspective shared in the edited, clean, and restrained falls as patronising to me. Sometimes the safe exhibits more distrust and prejudice under the surface in contrast to the highly challenging facades of these pieces. It is like when Orlando speaks with a prostitute in order to have a meaningful conversation, where she doesn’t face the patronisation of male authors. It only really works for me when something infiltrates the barriers of the acceptable to speak its truth, in this way I find the experience of the tainted enthralls me in ways which I had “never known the hours speed faster or more merrily," and then provokes my mind much more. These women may not hold back anything and clearly their autobiographical sense of being ostracised by society tints their work. Yet their ambivalence to triggering their audiences, or sometimes concerted effort to, produces works which achieve fearfully honest and direct reflections on the human condition.
