Her new show finds the artist reminiscing about “what you would have done differently, what you regret” and, she added, what you would do differently “if you had another chance”.
Her other main regret in life is the “amount of sex” she had, both as “a child and as a teenager”, with older men, which she said was “really bad”.
She hopes her work tackles topics like child abuse, abortion, depression and suicide in a non-judgemental manner.
“If I’m talking about being abused as a child, if I talk sexually, if I’m talking about being [sic] teenage sex with older men – now it’s called grooming, right? It wasn’t when I was 14…
“If I’m talking about suicide, if I’m talking about depression, all of the abortion – all of these issues that I make work about are really relevant and really important.”
Dame Tracey said she’s now feels “hideously drunk” on art when painting late at night or in the early hours of the morning, having previously felt “too guilty to paint” when she was younger.
In a broad-ranging interview, the south Londoner – whose dad was a Turkish Cypriot – also spoke about immigration, the NHS and how, in her opinion, the UK has ended up in “in a mess”, politically speaking.
And while she doesn’t believe AI will take her job as an artist, she said she thinks it is undermining truth in socety.
She wants there to be more “respect and regard” for the arts because, she said, “being creative and making art is a beautiful thing”.