Crossing Into Darkness

While Emin may be the curator for this show, a few of her most recent paintings are also featured in the gallery. Throughout her career, Emin has focused on sculpture, appliqués, and prints. Her two most famous installations, My Bed (1998) and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1995), at first glance are tongue-in-cheek displays of sexuality, but, when looking more deeply at the detail and motivations behind the pieces, a history of childhood sexual trauma, visceral intimacy, and unparalleled vulnerability reveal themselves. Emin’s multidisciplinary, autobiographical style provides a creative platform to address her own life experiences with depression, abuse, abortion, cancer, and rebirth as an unpolished and messily human phenomenon. 

Following her diagnosis and treatment for bladder cancer, Emin’s new lease on life offered a moment to reflect on her youth, her journey, and her frustration, which led her to curating Crossing Into Darkness. The title itself suggests an active crossing, rather than a passive washing over of the darkness, meaning there is some force behind us moving in that direction — societally or personally. As you walk through the gallery taking in dark abstract paintings and plants enclosed in glass, an array of sculpted heads – each deformed in their own way – watch your reactions.  

The exhibition is hard to describe; there is a beauty in each piece, yet they radiate sadness or anger and a longing for a sweet release. Joline Kwakkenbos’ Self-Portrait as a Painter as Lucretia (2025) sees a woman dressed like a pilgrim, spreading her legs to expose a vagina as blood from a self-inflicted stab wound pools between their legs. Her eyes plead to be let off the canvas, as though the painter is puppeteering her. Another of Kwakkenbos’ works, Detail of Lady of the Sea (2025), is equally haunting as a woman appears to be surrounded by ghosts, almost dancing with them as they cross in and out of her plane, including one in her abdomen.

Laura Footes’ The Castle and The Citadel (2025) slices up a blurry corporate office scene into panels, letting truth fall between the cracks, and corruption run rampant. Faces are hidden, masks are worn, and no one is held accountable. Her work taps into a psychedelic state that represents the disengaging and bewildering reaction to a society’s lack of care and espousing fraud. 

Sculptures like It Eats Away At Me (2025), by Lindsey Mendick, and God (2017), by David Altmejd, show the beauty of our bodies, even as they deteriorate. The ceramic breasts of Mendick’s piece slowly rot away through torn pieces of flesh. The rot of anxiety, of not meeting expectations, of not being ‘good enough,’ of succumbing to the noise permeates this woman, as it does to many women who constantly reach for more only to get lashed by culture’s sharp tongue and even sharper sword. Meanwhile, Altmejd blows out the centre of a face to reveal crystals sprouting from the inside, repositioning the head as a geode, as one of nature’s great beauties which we never would have known if his face had not been ripped away ever so violently. 

The exhibition is an experience of roving through emotions that we are too uncomfortable to sit with. In the show, human experience is deconstructed, broken down to the bare skeleton, blown apart, but breathtaking. Emin’s evolution over her decades-long career shows a development of tact and boundaries that don’t limit her artistic instinct but rather guide it, which we tangibly endure in Crossing Into Darkness.