‘I box to drive away evil’: Sue Webster on drunken brawls, her exciting new job – and having a baby at 52 | Art and design

Sue Webster remembers the buzzy art openings of the 1990s. A hazy memory of Damien Hirst riding on the shoulders of Lee Bowery, and a terrible fight with Jake Chapman at the Charles Saatchi Gallery, surfaces. “It was verbal, but he was probably about to punch me. You would have been pretty drunk with the free champagne.”

Webster and her former partner in art, romance and general punk, Tim Noble, arrived in London in 1992 as the YBAs rose to fame. Five years later, Saatchi stopped by the cheap-as-chips live-work space in Shoreditch and, while his taxi was still driving outside, picked up a light sculpture called Toxic Schizophrenia and a shadow sculpture titled Miss Understood and Mr. Minor. The shadow sculptures were meticulously mixed pieces of scrap and detritus that, when lit from one side, projected silhouettes of self-portraits onto the wall. Webster says she would sometimes cry when saying goodbye to an artwork after it had been sold. So what does an artist do when this long and successful partnership ends? “I wanted to open my mind and find out how I ended up here,” she says.

Webster, from Leicester, and Noble from Gloucestershire met on the first day of art school in Nottingham. The couple, who had been a married couple for more than 30 years, stopped living together in 2012, then divorced in 2018 and severed professional ties in 2020. Now, on the eve of her first solo corporate show, Webster refers to “Tim and Sue” in the third person, “as if it were a brand and I was separate, someone else did the work.”

We are now in her studio at Mall House in London, which she built with architect David Adjaye behind the shaggy façade of the house of the infamous “Mole Man” who tunneled under the streets from his basement, until the road eventually collapsed. Her cat is basking in the underfloor heating while she talks to me about the new business. The show is organized around the crime scene, a wall-filling confessional piece linking hundreds of artifacts from her life from her teenage years on up. Siouxsie and the Banshees loom large, as does her obsession with all things German, from Adidas to Nazis. There is a paperback of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Munch’s Scream and an unopened packet of Walker’s potato chips celebrating Leicester City’s Premier League win. Webster sees the crime scene in part as an exorcism. “I’ve spent half my life with Tim,” she says. “I’ve never lived alone. It was like dying. It was painful.”

Scattered throughout the studio are smaller, handwritten mind maps, first seen in Webster’s 2019 book I Was a Punk Teenager, which she says “helped me uncover my identity.” She was a panchayat-obsessed girl who did not come from an arty background, although her work for her electrician father later came in handy in delivering light sculptures. She likens her mind maps to wiring diagrams, too.

In 1980, when she was 13, her “unconscious self-destructive side” came to the fore and she spent six months in an inpatient unit in Leicester. Some aspects of life there shaped her identity. She wrote: “I was like a little dog, a ball of muscle that needed to be walked twice a day, but being escorted to the bathroom was often the only form of exercise I got. Tranquilizer intoxication numbed any unwanted thoughts that might cross my mind. As a result, later in life, I developed a vigorous training routine. I needed to swim every morning or box at my gym most nights of the week in order to flush out the bad that seemed to build up inside and have to be expelled at the end of each day.”

Among the documents hanging on the wall at the crime scene is a letter from the hospital dating back to 2011 after she miscarried her child with Noble. “I recognize this as the turning point in our relationship,” she says. “It was almost at the end, but we were still living together and I found out I was pregnant.” She was in her forties. “And I said, ‘Well, I’m at an age where I don’t have a choice. I can have this baby on my own.’ Then, inexplicably, her waters broke at 17 weeks, but “the baby wasn’t fully developed enough to survive,” she says. “They said, ‘Go home. You have to lie down and wait for the baby to come. I had to go to the hospital and then take this terrible pill, almost like a suicide pill, that separates you from the baby,’ and then they said you have to sit and wait until you have the baby. That was one of the worst things ever.”

Then, she says, Noble found someone else to start a family with. But now, staring at us defiantly from the studio walls are the paintings Webster made of herself while pregnant with her five-year-old son Spider, which inspired the title of her new show Birth of an Icon. In these larger-than-life works, her bare stomach erupts magnificently from a leather jacket or striped jacket. She gave birth to Spider in 2020, when she was 52 years old. She said she is proud to reverse the “old cliché” that only men can have children late in their careers, and says she has faced no judgment for having a child in her 50s. “There was nothing but this was what was supposed to happen.” She got Spider on her own, via IVF, and it took four tries. “So, yes, there were more miscarriages, but now we have a healthy boy.”

Webster has spent the last few years improving her painting skills, and falling in love with oils (as opposed to acrylics in her art school days). She watched tutorials on YouTube and asked advice from a man working behind the counter at her local Atlantis art supplies store. “I said, ‘I’m trying to make a flesh color,’ and he said, ‘Oh, you need titanium white, you need rose red, you need Neapolitan yellow, you need burnt sienna.'” He got this little piece of fabric, mixed it into flesh color, and you can add a little green. And here it is, she showed me, along with the weasel hair brushes that a portrait painter friend of mine had encouraged her to use.

What does the spider do with the results? “He knows he’s in his mother’s womb,” Webster says. “He came down and criticized me, saying, ‘I like this. I don’t like this because it’s a bit messy, and this isn’t over yet.” And then he’ll say, “This is 15 of 20. This is 17 of five.”

Since the split, she’s published her book, created a series of leather jackets and showed off her first massive pregnancy selfie in Sarah Lucas’s 2023 group show, Big Women. She’s happy to have gotten to this point, but there’s still a whole parade of Tim and Sue’s unseen work in store. She thought the show they were about to open in Berlin in 2020 “would be the best fucking show in the world.” That was the moment, unfortunately, when she realized she couldn’t work with Nobel anymore, and then the pandemic swallowed the world anyway.

“It would be really weird to show it now, because I’m on my own career path, so I can’t go back to it,” she says. “I was able to separate myself from this work.” Her new production couldn’t be more different. “Tim and I went in completely opposite directions,” she says. “He’s gone into his own mind. I’ve seen his work. I’m happy for him. I’ve gone into myself, too. I’ve gone very introspective. I do the most personal work.” When she was part of an artistic duo, she said anything personal she did on the side seemed unimportant. “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to do the work I do now,” she concluded. “It’s true for me. I never felt comfortable with it before, but I do now. And I feel like the world is ready to see it.”