The Guilty Feminist & Tracey Emin in Conversation
Artist Tracey Emin joins Deborah Frances-White for a candid conversation about art, life, and creative survival at Southbank Centre's Meltdown 2026 festival.
Why we picked this
Emin has spent three decades making work from the most unguarded material of her own life — illness, desire, grief, survival. Frances-White's format is exactly calibrated to draw out that kind of honesty without sentimentalising it.
The appeal here is the combination: Tracey Emin, who has built an international career on radical personal exposure, and Deborah Frances-White, whose Guilty Feminist podcast has become one of the most trusted spaces for unfiltered conversations about women’s lives in public. Their pairing inside Meltdown — Harry Styles’ artist-curated festival marking Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary — suggests a conversation that will go beyond the usual art-world register.
Tracey Emin became one of the defining voices of the Young British Artists generation in the 1990s, initially through text-based and textile work — the tent, the unmade bed — that turned autobiography into visual argument. Since then her work has evolved through painting, neon, and sculpture while maintaining the same commitment to using her own life as primary material. She has survived cancer and continued to make work through illness; she represents Britain at the Venice Biennale and has work in permanent collections worldwide. At sixty-three, there is more to look back on — and more to account for — than there has ever been.
Deborah Frances-White hosts the Guilty Feminist with a forensic warmth that disarms rather than interrogates. The conversation format suits Emin, who is most interesting when she is not performing the role of the artist and is instead simply talking about what happened and what she made of it. The event is part of Meltdown 2026 (June 11–21), running at approximately one hour. Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre.