Tracey Emin Astrology
A few weeks ago on Threads someone posted Marilyn Monroe’s birth chart and observed that it looked like a diamond. Marilyn is famous for singing Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend and it also occurred to me as I began writing this, that Marilyn was married to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and the chart also looks like a baseball diamond. Astrology can work in all kind of weird and wonderful ways - literal, figurative, psychological, predictive.
When I studied the chart, I noticed that the base of the diamond was Saturn - planet of structure, boundaries, life lessons - the teacher.
A week later, I was looking at the chart of another iconoclast - the artist Tracey Emin.
She also had a similar configuration - Saturn as an opposing point that many of the other planets are in dialogue with.
Marilyn presented an outward veneer of beauty and glamour that concealed a difficult biography whilst conversely Tracey Emin presents a confrontational and uncensored version of her life.
What connects these two women both astrologically and biographically is that they both came from a hard place (Saturn) and yet, were able to shine (like a diamond) through their art.
I found my way back to Tracey’s chart because my algorithm kept showing me clips of her talking about her new show at the Tate which is entitled A Second Life. There was something about how she talked about her art, her work and her life that compelled me to see the show and to delve deeper into her astrology.
Before going to see the exhibition, a friend was telling me that she was rewatching The Sopranos and we talked about how about how our response to a particular work of art changes depending on where we are in our lives.
This conversation came back to me when I revisited Emin’s now legendary piece My Bed. The first time I saw it, I was in my mid-twenties and I was decidedly nonplussed. It looked much the same as my own dirty and chaotic bedroom. Now that I am middle aged women with clean sheets, thriving plants and a quiet almost monastic life My Bed hits different. In fact, it hits so different that this time, I dropped my tote bag in awe and a packet of M&S BBQ Protein Rice Cakes rolled out into the middle of the gallery - my heart breaking for all the lost and broken young women trying to navigate their way into womanhood under the cosh of patriarchy.
Tracey Emin has been a ubiquitous figure in my life. Her name is familiar to every woman with a passing interest in art who came of age in the nineties and noughties.
There are other pieces in A Second Life that I have seen many times before. Perhaps the occasion that stays in my mind particularly is the retrospective at the Hayward in 2011 Love is What You Want which also featured the films Why I Didn’t Become a Dancer and How it Feels. At the time I was in my early thirties, around the same age that Emin was when she made How it Feels. I remember being slightly dismissive, maybe trying to push away my discomfort by saying that it was self-indulgent to talk about her suffering so candidly. Weren’t we all troubled and chaotic in our twenties? Didn’t we all experience terrible things at the hands of the patriarchy? Wasn’t that just life? Was that really art?
Fast-forward fifteen years, post-pandemic, the rise of fascism, the erosion of abortion rights in the USA. The comfortable liberalism of the 2010s rapidly slipping in away from us as the unfathomable becomes fathomable.
Here in 2026 How it Feels creates a bottle neck in the centre of the gallery as people stand transfixed watching the video. Fashionable couples, middle class parents with their teenage children, women sitting on the floor, leaning against the walls. There’s discomfort and there are tears but mainly there is rapt attention.
On the screen in the dark room, Emin is dressed in a pinstriped suit and a pinstriped shirt like a 90s yuppie city banker. She walks us around familiar London streets as she talks unflinching about her abortion.
I realise now that Emin paved the way for female confessional - for Fleabag, for Girls, for I May Destroy You. It was Emin who wasn’t afraid to be labelled a mad woman and a dissident and who took the chant “slag” that so many of us have heard and turned it into the defiant disco dance to Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel Mighty Real at the end of her short film Why I Didn’t Become a Dancer. Emin’s work foreshadowed the Me Too movement by a decade.
In the climate of the late nineties which only offered us Girl Power Tracey gave us raw unfiltered womanhood.
It is Tracey’s unmade bed that gave visual to our lived experience. It is Tracey’s candid recollection of her abortion which highlights why the fight for reproductive rights is so crucial.
At a moment when we are all furious at the patriarchy this exhibition is a call to arms.
The new work has a different timbre, one of the most arresting works was a corridor of photographs that documents the artist’s stoma. One side of the room is the before, the other side the after. Tracey’s work has always hollered, here is my pain, don’t look away
It fascinates me that there is a trigger warning as you enter the gallery and yet the exhibition simply echoes many women’s lived experiences.
The Birth Chart
Lets’s start with Saturn. It sits in the sign of Aquarius in the 7th house and it squares Tracey’s natal moon in Scorpio which resides in the 4th house. There is an inherent loneliness to this configuration. The 7th house is the house of relationships and to have Saturn there can often be an indication of long lasting and binding relationships but the square Saturn makes with a Scorpio moon tells a story of emotional needs being unmet due, to unconscious patterns that have their roots in childhood.
In this chart Saturn is both the root of suffering and the mud from whence the proverbial lotus emerges and that lotus is a Venus Mercury conjunction in the sign of Gemini. Mercury the winged messenger is in domicile here and he flies wing to wing with Venus the goddess of beauty and of love. They both inhabit the 11th house which is the house of community and friendship and they create a harmonious trine with Saturn. This is succour that Emin derives from her visual (Venus) storytelling (Mercury). Emin’s Famous neon signs are a visual expression of this Venus and Mercury conjunction.
In 2020 Emin began her second Saturn return which coincided with her battle with an aggressive form of bladder cancer. The pressure did not let up as Saturn then moved into her 8th house when it entered Pisces in March 2023 and later made a conjunction with her natal Chiron. Now Saturn has shifted into Aries and is making a meeting with her midheaven literally making her famous for her hardship.
When I look at a chart my eye gets drawn to different things and sometimes synchronicities and pattern recognition plays a part. Aside from Saturn one of the other things I noticed in Tracey’s chart was a cluster of planets in Virgo - Uranus, Pluto and Mars. A few days after I first pulled up Tracey’s chart a friend sent me a picture of musician Peaches wearing an “I’m gay of Palestine” leotard and I instinctively looked up Peaches’s chart. She also has a similar configuration of Uranus, Pluto and Mars in Virgo.
Uranus and Pluto are generational planets which means that there are a lot of artists that share that particular maelstrom of planets but when you add Mars into the mix it becomes another animal all together. It becomes a revolutionary (Pluto) war (Mars) for liberation (Uranus).
These planets are in dialogue with Emin’s natal Sun in the sign of Cancer which is the sign most associated with motherhood and nurture so it makes sense that Emin speaks of taboos related to maternal themes.
Emin is a Leo rising which means that the Sun rules the chart but the Sun is hidden is in 12th house. This often indicates a person who can see others and makes them feel seen but struggles to be seen and understood themselves.
The chart ruler (The Sun) is conjunct the fixed star Sirius which can be a fame indicator and it trines Neptune in Scorpio and alludes to a deep and rich imagination.
The title of the show A Second Life keeps coming back to me both as an echo of Simone de Beauvoir famous feminist text The Second Sex but also as a reflection on the Scorpionic themes of death and rebirth which are deeply intrenched in Emin’s Scorpio Moon narrative.
Another rebirth comes in the form of Emin’s home town Margate which in recent years has been completely regenerated through the power of art. Margate serves as geographical metaphor for the artist herself, just like Margate, Emin has transcended a difficult history and in doing so, has put herself firmly back on the map.