In a photographic self-portrait taken not long after she was diagnosed with squamous cell bladder cancer in 2020, Tracey Emin’s iPhone shrouds her right breast as our line of vision descends from her catheter to her urostomy bag to her disposable knickers. Her body is fragile here in this hospital mirror, yet her gaze is anything but. It looks us dead in the eye as if to say: I matter, this matters – a sureness that challenges the notion of subjugation in times of ill-health.

Even now, six years after her life-saving surgery, Emin refuses to conform to what may, or may not, make us feel comfortable when it comes to her post-operative body. As well as losing her bladder, Emin also lost her uterus, ovaries, lymph nodes, part of her colon, her urethra and part of her vagina. And yet she has found a striking autonomy in documenting the changes in her body. “This is mine, I own it,” she affirmed in an interview not long after her surgery.

It’s a phrase that I recited, like a mantra, in my own hospital bed after my colectomy in 2023. And it was in tribute to Emin that I took self-portraits of my body when I was recovering at home. In one photograph, taken two weeks after my surgery, my right hand lifts up my jumper to reveal the bloated and bruised belly beneath it – knickers folded down to expose its bloody surgical wounds. In another, my camera homes in on the purply-grey comet tail of an IV drip bruise that streaks across my left wrist.

Would I have taken these photographs if it wasn’t for Emin? Probably not. In the weeks that led up to my own life-saving surgery, I became increasingly fixated on the ways in which her no-holds-barred Polaroids, like the squares of her autobiographical blankets, were urging us to look at her in ways that perhaps we’d rather not. Twenty-seven years after her sculptural work My Bed catapulted her to tabloid fame in the late 1990s, Emin is still challenging us to acknowledge the things we tend to pull away from. Only these days her bleeding nudes are centred squarely on the presence of non-visible disability and what Harry Weller, creative director of Emin’s studio, calls “her wild scramble for existence”.

“Back in the 90s, people used to say it was confessional art,” Emin recently mused to Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate. Only it wasn’t. “I wasn’t confessing anything at all to anybody,” she corrected her past critics – and maybe even her present fans. I thought of Emin’s vital reframe only a few weeks ago when I visited her landmark show at Tate Modern and contemplated her 2023 painting, I watched Myself die and come alive. In it, her red-swabbed body is splayed out on a table, she is watched over by the black cloak of death, and her mother’s ashes are resting in a casket behind her bloody hair. Like most of Emin’s artworks, this painting isn’t asking for a certain kind of gaze from us – it exists for itself alone, and that’s what makes it so corporeally present. The same can be said for her 2024 painting Barbed Wire Stitches in which her white thighs part like two craggy cliffs to reveal the scratchy black sutures between them.

Call it visceral, call it personal. But, like Emin, I too struggle with the word “confessional” in relation to women’s expression of their experiences. The implication being that there is something guilt-inducing and therefore even shameful about a woman drawing attention to herself both in her life and art. As if by doing so, she needs to beg pardon for it. Only Emin has never subscribed to this falsehood. Come to think of it, neither did Frida Kahlo over the course of her all-too-short life (Kahlo died when she was only 47) – another autobiographical artist whose retrospective is set to appear at Tate Modern next month.

Mexico’s ever-proliferating export, Kahlo, whose magical realist visions began in the paralysing months after a tram crashed into her bus in 1925; a metal rail skewering her abdomen and exiting her vagina, breaking her spinal column, collarbone and pelvis in the process, and irreparably damaging her reproductive organs. Over the months that followed, her parents fixed a mirror to the canopy of her bed so that she could see herself and, in turn, be seen with the help of her palette. It was an act of emancipation that one can see in her 1932 painting My Birth – a surrealist depiction of Kahlo’s birth and her miscarriage entwined – in which the act of childbirth becomes a Kafkaesque scene by way of the mother’s covered head and her baby’s lifeless body stuck between splayed limbs and blood stains. Yes, it is gruesome, but – like Emin’s selfie almost 90 years later – it is real. How we choose to engage with both tells us much about how far we’re willing to acknowledge their bodily reality – and on what terms.

As Kahlo’s biographer Hayden Herrera remarked in 1983, Kahlo’s art has a particular intensity and strength “that can hold the viewer in an uncomfortably tight grip”. We can see this for ourselves in her 1944 artwork, The Broken Column: a valiant self-portrait of chronic pain that evokes the Saint Sebastian paintings of the Christian faith. Only in Kahlo’s martyrdom, her nail-pricked torso, like the fissured desert behind her, has been cut and cranked open to show us the blood red flesh of her internal reality, a cracked classical column lodging itself against her chin so as to make her as rigid as stone.

With an anatomical eye on her wounds, Kahlo would redraw what she called her “body’s landscape” on her own terms, making her disabilities into something transcendental, a devotional act that helped her transform the mundanity of her day-to-day experience of chronic pain into something extraordinary. And I think the same could be said of Emin.

“What would she have done if she had had any children?” Emin wrote of Kahlo in 2005. “Also, what if she hadn’t had one misfortune after another?” Questions we know still haunt Emin’s work as much as they did Kahlo’s. For both of these artistically divergent artists, it is their highly personal experiences – of illness, of disability, of miscarriage and abortion – which have always counted on the canvas. And it’s what has drawn me closer to them as I’ve navigated my way through my own health complications of late – several surgeries and with more to come in the future.

Twenty years after my thyroid cancer diagnosis, and three years after my bowel cancer scare, it is to these artists that I return to more than any other to foster a sense of autonomy in myself, and to strengthen my understanding of what it means to carry the light and dark in my own bodily narrative. I see the defiance and aliveness in Emin’s bleeding stoma selfies. I see the pink flesh of the melon in Kahlo’s 1953 painting Fruta de la Vida and how it conjures the crimson innards of the artist’s wounds. And I see how art can be a response to pain – a way of making sense of the body when it turns against itself.