Poetry and Art: Magma Poetry Editors Respond to Art

In our new bi-monthly feature, Magma Editors share their reflections on current art taking place across the UK

Magma board members have always been deeply engaged with different forms of art over the years, as editors and individual poets. Some of Magma Poetry recent issues have engaged directly with different forms of art (film, theatre, music, architecture). In this new series, our editors will respond to different art forms. We hope you enjoy their unique points of views!

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Lisa Kelly on Tracey Emin
February 26, 2026

Review: Tracey Emin: A Second Life

For a long time, I’ve been troubled by the memory of two exchanges I had with men in my life when I announced my respective pregnancies. At a family gathering when it was noticed I wasn’t drinking, I admitted I was pregnant. In a heartbeat, my father asked, ‘Are you going to have an abortion?’ When I discovered I was pregnant with our second child, I met my husband at the tube to tell him the good news. He responded by asking, ‘What are we going to do?’

For some reason – call it the connectedness of the universe – I was obsessing about these two incidents on the morning I went to Tracey Emin’s exhibition at Tate Modern. In fact, I even phoned my husband to rehash why my father asked what he did when I was pregnant with our first child and what my husband meant with his unsettling question as our second child was planned. My father, who has long since passed, was a very loving grandfather and my husband says his reaction was due to anxiety about new responsibilities, but still….This is a conversation we have had before and will no doubt have again, but it startled me that this was my thought-pattern before the exhibition and walking from dark room to dark room, I felt a compelling emotional connection with Emin’s work.

I have never had an abortion – Emin has had two and she unpacks these experiences through her art. Her quilt The Last of the Gold (2002) is an A to Z of abortion with advice to women facing a similar situation. The precarity of a woman’s body, its porosity, and to an extent, its ungovernability is the throbbing, red, raw heart of Emin’s expression. I spoke to another woman while looking at an exhibit because I felt I had to connect with someone and we had struck up a quiet sympathy – finding a similar pace and, without intention, often ending up in front of the same artwork. We both agreed how incredibly powerful the work was and how emotional we both felt. She told me she was writing a memoir and that she believed Emin approached memoir differently from the traditional book – through text, textile, painting, video, sculpture, installation and drawing. Emin, we agreed, was a confessional artist in the 90s, at the time notorious for My Bed (1998), and she continues to be a confessional artist since recovering from surgery for bladder cancer and living with a stoma; and My Bed takes on an entirely new emotional resonance so many years later, post-surgery.

We parted and moved on, but it made me think of the rise of ‘confessional’ poetry and to an extent the slur that poets are labelled with by some critics if they are deemed to fall in this category – especially women or poets of colour. In today’s discourse, it is often linked to identity politics and ‘confessions’ are dismissed and derided in favour of returning to a time when most poetry recognised in the critical public domain was self-contained, sanitised, formally strict and written by white men. Things have changed and continue to change but there remains this residual snobbery and I wonder if it is the same in the artworld Emin inhabits. I am sure she doesn’t care. From her early work to the present day, the feeling is she has always done and will always do her own thing. Whatever it is that grabs her attention and her gut and means she is doing something radical and real. Harry Weller, her creative director and key assistant, highlighted Emin’s approach in an introduction to the assembled journalists, explaining how she will often sit and look at a canvas and wait for the urge to create something essential – often with an energy so violent, she tears the canvas – and will paint over work she doesn’t believe meets the high standard she sets for herself. It is not about money. She could, like some contemporary artists, have a team of people reproducing an idea – a factory of assistants doing spot paintings for example – but she has never been an artist to chase the money, and her current free studio-based art school in her hometown of Margate shows her deep social roots and commitment to the next generation of artists.

I have not focused on too many specific works in this review because this collection is indeed a body of work. Every piece from the younger Emin connects to the present-day Emin. They share the same network of veins, organs and heartbeat. You feel for the young Emin and what she went through at the hands of predatory men, just as you feel for the adult Emin 40 years on, and her bravery in charting and photographing the reality of her cancer. The body is a site of art and confession. It is her most enduring material. But she is aware of where the body ends and Death Mask (2002) confronts this reality. Meanwhile, there is also joy. As Weller highlighted during the view, ‘Look out for the cats!’ As spiritual companions in this world and the next, they make unexpected and magical appearances in her work.

This is an exhibition of sorrow and joy and everything in between. Watching Emin dance to Sylvester’s disco classic, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” in her video installation, Why I Never Became A Dancer (1995) with such sheer vivacity and energy is contagious. It is a divine revenge on all the abusers who chanted ‘Slag’ during a dance competition she entered in Margate. They will remain, like a lot of abusers, in the shadows, unloved and uncelebrated. The opposite is true for Emin. She is loved and celebrated and I urge everyone to go and see this exhibition. It will undoubtedly bring up ‘stuff’ in your own life, and that is a good thing surely because we need to confront our stuff and I couldn’t think of a better artist on this planet to help us.

I began this review with a confession, not anything on Emin’s scale, but nevertheless something I don’t normally share, but this is what Emin provokes, an intense empathy with her work as vulnerable beings on this planet who all have ‘stuff’. Maybe we need to bring this ‘stuff’ into the open more and speak our truth, be kinder to ourselves and each other for what we go through in life and to not let the misogynists, racists, abusers or critics who believe they can silence our ‘stuff’ or our ‘confessions’ win. Emin is an artist who works in multiple mediums has something for everyone. As a poet, I was particularly interested in work that incorporated text and one textile in particular caught my eye. In a simple wooden frame, a white piece of cloth is stitched with black thread to read Why Be Afraid ten times. Without any question marks, the phrase becomes a mantra we could all learn from.

Tracy Emin: A Second Life runs from 27th February – 31 August at the Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

If you’d like to commission a review, please get in touch with Magma Editorial Board: info@magmapoetry.com

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