TJ McNamara: Raw experiences of beauty amid all the trauma

One of Tracey Emin's blankets in the The Love is What You Want exhibition. Photo / Supplied

A revelation on a sunny Sunday spent on the South Bank's Hayward Gallery in London is that the work of Tracey Emin, famous since 1998 for displaying her bed, is not just a one-off, but the output of a highly significant artist with a continuing line of development.

She may seem frivolous - her retrospective at the Hayward is advertised all over London by a poster showing the artist's backside as she runs naked up a street waving the Union Jack. The exhibition shows that for all her eccentricity, her art provides profound insight into the world of women, not as a feminist polemicist but by laying her soul bare on behalf of all women.

The retrospective, Love Is What You Want, is mostly about the absence of love and the struggle for independence. Almost everything is autobiographical. It is intensely about being a woman. In some ways, it is almost romantic, with roses scattered through it in unexpected places, but mostly it is ironic, witty and, at times, profoundly moving.

The show has work from all periods of her career and begins with a room full of her "blankets". These are done in applique that should fit in with feminist art theory - a woman working in a woman's medium - but they go beyond theory to personal statements. These are mostly in words but use the emotional power of colour and images on fabrics to reinforce the aphorisms, exclamations and various bits of autobiography which together create a sense of personality, opinion and aggressive defence. They are savage, funny and create a whole world.

These blankets provide fascinating reading, visual wit and throb with enormous energy.

In the same gallery as the abundance of the blankets is a plain wooden structure. Emin seems to like jetties, beach huts and weathered wood. This tattered sculpture is a dream of isolation - a rickety jetty with a shed on the end. From this primitive structure, you move to galleries with dark walls and glowing neons. These neons are much in the news since one was recently installed at 10 Downing St. It says More PAssion.

The neons are in the artist's handwriting. Each one is a little motto or saying with a twist to it. The composition is nothing special, because they often take simple shapes like hearts, but the writing is another way of communicating ideas and paradoxes about the world, made visually vivid by glowing light.

Films screen at intervals throughout the show. On one of her blankets, Emin wrote: "She was heading towards the sunset shouting ye ha all the way."

One film is a variation on this. It shows Emin riding a horse on a beach wearing a cowboy hat, a brassiere, a jacket and pointy shoes. She rides towards the sunset but, every now and then, on the left is a glimpse of Margate, her home town. The plain reality is to the left and a romantic sunset lies ahead. It is called Riding for a Fall but, in its quirky way, suggests a triumph while putting a new spin on cliches.

Other films are documentation for the art. A room titled Trauma refers to Emin's abortions - the first of which was badly botched. The documentary aspect includes a film where she is interviewed about her experience as well as a pregnancy kit and blood-stained tampons.

One artwork is a piece of crochet done in string. The string comes from inside the ball and the unfinished intricate work lies alongside, still attached. Tucked into the ball is a crochet hook traditionally used in amateur abortions.

The real power lies in the drawings. Emin's draftsmanship is brilliant. She uses an agitated line which conveys strong emotions in the hand that traces the image. Here, as elsewhere in the work, the vagina is much on display. The agitated line of the drawing, sometimes emphasised by being stitched into material, conveys an extraordinary depth of desolating feeling.

Drawings are the backbone of her art. Often she does not draw directly, but inks up a sheet of glass, puts the paper on top and draws freehand on the back of the paper. Thus, the drawings have a special edgy feeling with something of the wiry energy of Egon Schiele. The few paintings in the show also have the same tortured quality as that shown by the Austrian.

In the last room Emin's latest neon is a huge, radiant White Rose created from 90 feet of tubing. It truly speaks of blossoming and richness and is a monumental expression of the roses that appear hidden throughout the show. It is a striking expression of beauty amid all the trauma and the pervading, appalling honesty of the show.

Back across the river, at the highly fashionable White Cube Gallery, is an exhibition by Jake and Dinos Chapman. This famous pair usually work collaboratively, but here they have done work separately but muddy the waters by not saying who did which of the 30 or more works on display.

The brothers' penchant has always been for horror, brutality and blasphemy, done brilliantly. The shock of their work is, unlike Emin, not the shock of real life but the shock of horror films or theatre. Their earlier work showing hundreds of little figures engaged in brutality in concentration camps seemed to have some sympathy with the real world. Here the work, though sophisticated, seems to have no heart.

There is a particular shock when you enter the gallery and see, on the far side of a collection of savage paintings, a dozen or so children gathered to look at one of them. It is in the nature of the show that one gets a school-teacherly shock - "Who brought those children to this macabre show?" When you reach the children you see they are the show. Not only are their uniforms adorned with swastikas, but their noses are elephant, chicken, donkey, rat, pig and even witch and their eyes are ferocious.

Here and upstairs, where the show makes blasphemous additions to religious works, the emphasis is on corruption, hideous paradox and dismay. Art made by Emin and the Chapmans is not comfortable.

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