Tracey Emin has been honoured with a damehood for services to British art, and has also revealed to the BBC that she has just been given the four-year "all clear" from cancer. Emin, one of Britain’s most acclaimed artists, was diagnosed with serious bladder cancer in 2020 and underwent major surgery. She says she didn’t think she’d still be alive now, "let alone sitting here and becoming a dame".
"When you've had cancer to the level that I had, where you really think you're probably going to die and you're looking at months ahead of you to live - and then suddenly everything turns around, it's like being born again and life starts again and all these really amazing things happen." We meet in the studio at her imposing central London home in a Georgian square in Bloomsbury. We’re surrounded by her paintings, some propped up on stools.
The drips of white, red and blue paint on the parquet floor below them are evidence of Emin’s style. "I'm quite aggressive with the paint and my movements and my strokes and everything," she says. The damehood, revealed in the King’s Birthday Honours on Friday, was entirely unexpected, she says.
She had already been appointed CBE in 2012, but "Dame Tracey", she laughs, "has a ring about it". "It's really cool," she says. "I don't think there's ever been one before.
" She might not have become Dame Tracey if she hadn’t been alerted to a letter marked "urgent" sitting unopened at her former studio. She tells us she spent a day at a Buc.