Tracey Enim – A Second Life
Tate Modern until 31 Aug 2026
“The abortion was a mistake but it was the best thing that happened to me.“
Few artists wear their heart on their sleeve like Tracey Enim does. Perhaps no one does as she does. And this heart bleeds. It’s been used and abused, but it seems that no matter what is thrown at her, she absorbs it like an energy field and somehow reprocesses it and spews it back out as Art. It splatters, screams, dances, cries – and as a man witnessing this on International Women’s Day – it resonates like a bass string.
Enim is the Shakespearean tragedy the bard never wrote. Diary entries are vivid memory logs, forensically detailed, not so much scathing but more pointed. And as the truth cuts with unbiased precision, her memories are worn like scars. One senses she has little choice but to.
Upon reading the handwritten pages, we are not so much the viewer of these memoirs but it felt rather like being an unwitting voyeurist, such is the level of intimacy, before only later realising the evidence of blood had framed us as a possible accomplice. There were occasions when it was like witnessing the scene of a crime. Some of the detail shocks, be it graphic, word or sound bite. Incriminating name dropping, love and violence, teeth, blankets, abortion, Grandma’s chair, non consensual sex, alleyways, cancer, blood dripping red paint, crude operating tables, the human form as a vortex of emotion, explicit polaroids…
Enim speaks of her experiences such as the sexual abuse in the same matter-of-fact manner she would if reciting the contents of her fridge or wardrobe. Has the brutality of her experiences numbed her to the point where it has become nothing more than another
Her pink form is semi translucent as compositions seem to capture both the internal suffering and external anguish. The candidness is not so blunt but alarmingly honest. And this takes strength, but what has she got to lose when so much was taken from her – and more recently taken out of her? But here is the paradox – the more she suffers, the greater the creative output.
There is this release and you feel it. The stitched words, scrawled feelings and vivid imagery flicker like warning signs, they embed themselves into your psyche so later on in the evening you are replaying them over in your mind. The trauma is now shared and her experiences are clearly very real – too real to conceal. The difference between Enim and many others is that she doesn’t go into character, Enim is the character.
The operating table becomes the picture frame, but more than that. It is a contraption which transcends the (innocent) victim from the reluctant patient to being eternally traumatised. Enim is almost able to scream on paper and canvas as we witness the ejection of uterus blood. It is a similar space-frame with which Bacon imprisoned Pope Innocent X, except here the artist is the casualty. And we wonder if we are in some way responsible. Someone is.
We see disturbing child-like (Munchesque) drawings, perhaps like one would imagine on the wall of a dysfunctional home – a cry for survival – a primal scream. Drawn, painted, scratched purely from raw internal emotion; about a foetus, not once but twice, the second discharged in a taxi, due to the procedure being grossly mishandled. Or how she was deflowered out of childhood by men who never grew out of boyhood. We see her like a red spinning top on super 8 cine film, the old stomping ground of Margate and its fairground, whose kinetic, chaotic and illuminated attractions bear an uncanny resemblance to her turbulent life.
The array of table top bronze sculptures were a timely relief from the central tragedy and these impressed. The palpable finger pummelling of clay into human contortions of energy had a spirit about them. It was perhaps more than just a nod to Henry Moore or even Giacometti, as when Enim analyses the human form, she does it both externally and internally. Her method is closer to Da Vinci, not anatomical but more like an autopsy on a kicking and screaming form. And this may be it, Enim has been dying ever since her first rape, but every time she was violated she exploded with more energy. Was it a form of processing, a coping mechanism, self therapy?
The neon is a crass money maker in my opinion, and even though we have seen the large red paintings before, these remain impressively energetic with their splatter-like autopsical explosion of someone trauma has repeatedly failed to finish off.
Enim is disturbingly honest and often honestly disturbing. It is almost unprecedented that an artist (or anyone in the public eye for that matter), could throw themselves, warts and all, onto an analyst’s couch so-to-speak (or operating table) without any level of hesitation, embarrassment, guilt or doubt. Perhaps she knows that after every bout of misfortune comes an outpouring of raw expression. If that is the case then the latter can not exist without the former. And perhaps together with the subjected violence came an appreciation for the precious commodity of time – hence the diaries.
Enim is a paradox which makes sense. She is marmite to many, but few could disregard the sheer bravery here. It is a large, provoking, shockingly candid and exhaustive exhibition which runs, dances and screams until 31 Aug 2026 and I would not be surprised if many return to it. This could be one of the shows of the decade when everyone has had time to properly digest. It is certainly a Second Life.
Tracey Enim – A Second Life
Tate Modern until 31 Aug 2026
Tate Modern until 31 Aug 2026
– Article written by Graham Everitt