Tracey Emin: Don’t ask me to be like you

‘I’ve changed, my body’s changed, my mind’s changed, but … it’s like wax – the candle is still there, the wax just changes its form.’¹ Tracey Emin, quoted in ‘Artist Tracey Emin says her cancer is “gone”’, BBC, 9 April 2021, , accessed 4 Feb. 2025

Known for her deeply personal approach to art making, Dame Tracey Emin explores heightened states of emotion and re-evaluates societal constructs of the self, womanhood and femininity. In 2020, a serious cancer diagnosis and subsequent surgery resulted in changes to both Emin’s physical body and her approach to life and work. In a 2021 interview, Emin shared that ‘I never realised how much I wanted to live until I thought I was going to die’.² Tracey Emin, quoted in ‘Tracey Emin’s shock art shifts “from sex to love”’, Channel 4 News, 16 May 2011, , accessed 20 Jan. 2025.

Emin began her career in the 1980s, rising to prominence with the generation of British artists known as the YBAs or Young British Artists, which included Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Michael Landy among others. As suggested by their name, the YBAs were known for their youth and careerist ambitions; a transgressive new generation fixed on changing the international contemporary art world.

Don’t ask me to be like you was featured in Emin’s 2024 exhibition I Followed You to the End at White Cube Gallery, London. The work came into the NGV Collection through the support of Jo Horgan AM and Peter Wetenhall. Her new series of paintings depicts moments of extreme emotion, elation or pain, often drawing from Emin’s past and present experiences.

At the centre of the work stands a nude figure of a woman, presented as a series of graphic lines; her figure both abstracted and formed by the intense emotion that it holds within. Emin’s way of painting creates a sense of urgency through immediate and raw emotion and a seemingly rapid, impulsive technique. Around the central figure, the paint drips to the bottom of the canvas, signifying a sense of overwhelm. It is as if the body has been submerged in pure feeling, visible only as a ghostly outline through gestural brushstrokes of paint.

Frequently drawing on recurring imagery, Emin does not follow the predetermined process of making preliminary sketches. Rather, her paintings appear as though they must escape from her directly onto the canvas, transposing inner truths. She regularly paints over her works, wanting the paintings to appear ‘effortless’ and to ‘have a life and be living and breathing and moving’.³ Yale Centre for British Art, ‘At home: artists in conversation | Tracey Emin’, YaleBritishArt YouTube channel, 23 June 2022, , accessed 20 Jan. 2025. Through her process she revisits defining moments from her past, weaving them into the present.

In a continuing thread through Emin’s practice, the nude is central but interrogated and depicted unlike many representations of the body throughout art history. Throughout her career, Emin has presented the female body as a site of emotion – of pain or love – rather than as an object. In Don’t ask me to be like you, along with other recent works, she reaffirms this sentiment as her body continues to be transformed by illness and ageing.

Emin has described her work as being about ‘rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone’.⁴ Tracey Emin, quoted in ‘The Last Great Adventure Is You’, White Cube Gallery, June 2014, , accessed 20. Jan 2025. Here she grapples with and sustains her independence, pleading ‘don’t ask me to be like you, don’t ask me to feel like you, my world, my life is not like yours and never will be’ before affirming, ‘I think alone, I am alone and strongest of all, most of the time now – I want to be alone’.⁵ibid.

The bodily outline within the painting is reminiscent of the bronze sculptures and works on paper by Emin that are also held in the NGV Collection and were displayed in the 2023 NGV Triennial (generously supported by Andrew and Judy Rogers, The Nigel Peck AM and Patricia Peck Fund, M. G. Chapman Bequest, Suzanne Dawbarn Bequest and Professor AGL Shaw AO Bequest). The gouache drawings echo the forms seen in her paintings, with strong, gestural lines forming abstracted female bodies. Similarly, the bronze sculptures, which she has described as ‘like drawings in a strange way’, present abstracted bodies, both eroticised and defenceless.⁶ Tracey Emin, quoted in ‘Peeled from a private life: Tracey Emin’s new bronzes’, Sculpture Magazine, 2 Sept. 2021, , accessed 20. Jan 2025.

Emin’s own handwriting in the painting reads like a poem or a plea to a past lover. Emin has often used text and writing as poetic expressions of her emotions, most notably in her neon works, represented in the NGV Collection with Love Poem for CF, 2007, also generously supported by Jo Horgan AM and Peter Wetenhall. These private notes become an individual yet universal voice broadcast to her audience. In Don’t ask me to be like you, Emin’s words appear as if they could have been taken from a diary or a letter, a personal note to which we have been granted access.

Here Emin’s thoughts on mortality converge with those of being consumed by her lover or partner. She asks or pleads, to stand alone in the complication of her own self and body, which through the culmination of emotion and experience, has provided the space for this work to be created.

Anna Honan is NGV Curatorial Project Officer, Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture.

The NGV warmly thanks Jo Horgan AM and Peter Wetenhall for their generous support in acquiring Tracey Emin’s Don’t ask me to be like you, 2024, for the NGV Collection.

This article first appeared in NGV Magazine, March-April 2025

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