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Sue Webster is reminiscing about boozy 90s art openings. A hazy memory of Damien Hirst riding Leigh Bowery’s shoulders is surfacing, and a terrible fight with Jake Chapman at Charles Saatchi’s gallery. “It was a verbal thing but he was probably about to punch me. You’d get very drunk on the free champagne.”
Webster, and her former partner in art, romance and general punk rockery, Tim Noble, hit London in 1992 as the YBAs rose to fame. Five years later, Saatchi stopped by their cheap-as-chips live-work space in Shoreditch and, with his taxi still running outside, snapped up a light sculpture called Toxic Schizophrenia and a “shadow sculpture” titled Miss Understood and Mr Meanor. The shadow sculptures were meticulously melded pieces of junk and detritus which, when lit from one side, projected self-portrait silhouettes onto the wall. Webster says she would sometimes cry when saying goodbye to an artwork after selling it. So what does an artist do when such a long and successful partnership ends? “I wanted to unravel my brain, and work out how I ended up here,” she says.
Webster is from Leicester, and met Noble, from Gloucestershire, on the first day of art school in Nottingham. The pair, who made work as a pair for more than 30 years, stopped living together in 2012, divorced in 2018 and cut professional ties in 2020. Now, on the eve of her first institutional solo show, Webster refers back to “Tim and Sue” in the third person, “like it’s a brand and I’m dissociated, someone else made that work.”
We’re in her studio at Mole House in London, which she built with architect David Adjaye behind the dishevelled facade of the home of the infamous “mole man” who dug tunnels under the streets from his basement, until eventually the road collapsed. Her cat luxuriates on the under-floor heating while she talks me through the new works. The show is organised around Crime Scene, a wall-filling, confessional piece linking hundreds of artefacts of her life, from her teenage years up. Siouxsie and the Banshees loom large, as does her obsession with all things German, from Adidas to the Nazis. There’s a paperback of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Munch’s Scream and an unopened 2016 packet of Walker’s crisps celebrating Leicester City winning the Premier League. Webster sees Crime Scene partly as an exorcism. “I spent half my life with Tim,” she says. “I’d never lived on my own. It was almost like a death. It was traumatic.”
Dotted around the studio are smaller hand-written mind maps, first seen in Webster’s 2019 book I Was a Teenage Banshee, and which she says “helped me unravel who I was.” She was a Banshees-obsessed girl who hadn’t come from an arty background, although working for her electrician dad did come in handy later for wiring light sculptures. She likens her mind maps to wiring diagrams, too.
In 1980, aged 13, her “unconscious self-destructive side” came to the fore and she spent six months in a Leicester inpatient unit. Some aspects of life there shaped who she is. “I was like a small dog, a ball of muscle that needed to be walked twice a day,” she writes, “but being escorted to the bathroom was often the only form of exercise I had. Being poisoned by sedatives numbed any unwanted thoughts that may have otherwise occurred to me. As a result, later in life I have developed a vigorous training routine. I need to swim each morning or else box at my gym most nights of the week in order to exorcise the badness that seems to build up inside and that needs to be expelled at the end of each day.”
Among the documents pinned to the wall in Crime Scene is a hospital letter from 2011 after she miscarried her baby with Noble. “I define that as being the turning point in our relationship,” she says. “It was coming to the end, but we were still living together and I found I was pregnant.” She was in her 40s. “And I said, well, I’m at an age where I’ve got no choice. I can have this baby on my own.” Then, inexplicably, her waters broke at 17 weeks but “the baby wasn’t formed enough to survive”, she says. “They said to me, go home. You’ve got to lie down and wait for the baby to come.I had to go into hospital and then take this terrible pill, almost like a suicide pill, which separates you from the baby and then they said you’ve got to sit and wait to give birth to the baby. It was one of the worst things ever.”
After that, she says, Noble found someone else to start a family with. But now, staring defiantly out at us from the walls in the studio are paintings Webster has made of herself while pregnant with her five-year-old son Spider which inspired her new show’s title Birth of an Icon. In these larger-than-life works, her naked belly bursts gloriously out from a leather or a pinstripe jacket. She had Spider in 2020, when she was 52. She has said that she was proud to reverse the “age-old cliche” that only men can have children late in their careers, and says she didn’t experience any judgment over her having a baby in her 50s. “There was nothing but ‘this is what’s meant to happen’.” She had Spider on her own, via IVF, and it took four attempts. “So yes, there were more miscarriages, but now we have a healthy boy.”
Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian
Webster has spent the past few years doggedly refining her painting skills, and falling in love with oils (as opposed to the acrylics of her art school days). She watched YouTube tutorials and even sought advice from a man behind the counter at Atlantis, her local art materials shop. “I said: I’m trying to do a flesh tone and he said, ‘Oh, you need a titanium white, you need a rose red, you need a Naples yellow, you need a burnt sienna.’ He got this little bit of canvas, and mixed them into a flesh tone, and you can add a little bit of green.” And there it is, she shows me, along with the weasel-hair brushes a portrait-painter friend encouraged her to use.
What does Spider make of the results? “He knows he’s in mummy’s belly,” says Webster. “He comes down and gives me a critique, ‘I like this one. I don’t like that one because it’s a bit messy, and that one’s not finished.’ And then he’ll say, ‘This is a 15 out of 20. This one’s a 17 out of five.’”
Since the split, she has published her book, customised a series of leather jackets and exhibited her first, enormous, pregnancy self portrait for the 2023 Sarah Lucas-curated group show, Big Women. She’s happy to have reached this point, but there remains an entire show’s worth of unseen Tim and Sue work in storage. She believed the show they were about to open in Berlin in 2020 “was going to be the best fucking show in the world”. That was the moment, unfortunately, that she realised she couldn’t work with Noble any more, and then the world was swallowed up by the pandemic anyway.
“It would be really weird to show it now, because I’m on a trajectory with my own work, so I can’t go back to it,” she says. “I’ve managed to separate myself from that work.” Her new output couldn’t be more different . “Tim and I have both gone off in completely opposite directions,” she says. “He’s gone off into his own mind. I’ve seen his work. I’m happy for him. I’ve gone off into my inner self as well. I’ve gone very introspective. I’m making the most personal work.” When she was part of an art duo, she says that anything personal she made on the side felt unimportant. “I’m happy for the opportunity to make the work that I’m making now,” she concludes. “It’s true to me. I didn’t feel comfortable with it before, but I do now. And I feel like the world’s ready to see it.”
