DRIVING DOWN THE Essex Road to Sarah Lucas’s house in Hackney, it strikes me that the stuff of her sculptures could be gleaned right here, from the ungentrified scattering of greengrocers, newsagents and kebab shops. Lucas has made artwork from Marlboro Light cigarettes, painstakingly gluing them over toilets, garden gnomes and the bodies of wrecked cars. She’s stuffed pairs of tights to create the limp, leggy female figures she calls Bunnies. But she’s best known for the bleakly humorous assemblages she made in the 1990s, partly inspired by reading the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, and constructed from furniture, fruit and veg, and bits of dried and rotting meat. For 1995’s Bitch, she stretched a white T-shirt over a table in a simulacrum of a bending body, two melons sagging from where its breasts would be. At the business end, a vacuum-packed kipper dangles from a nail. Melons and fish: a crude synecdoche of a woman reduced to her sexual elements, yes, but also an exercise in minimalism, an experiment in how little you need to ignite the whole grim psychodrama of gender and sexuality.
Lucas graduated from Goldsmiths with a degree in fine art in 1987, part of a tight-knit, predominantly working-class group of friends that included Gary Hume, the late Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst. It was Hirst who organised the seminal group show Freeze in a Docklands warehouse in 1988, when he was still a student, showing his first spot painting alongside pieces by Hume and Lucas. This combination of chutzpah and attention-grabbing conceptual work rapidly established them in the public gaze as the Young British Artists or YBAs. Her own career-making piece came four years later with Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, the components of which she fried up each morning right there in the gallery, a tiny temporary space in a Soho shop, before slapping them out on the wooden table: food as genitals, food as face, like a corner-shop version of Magritte’s Rape. It was bought by the collector Charles Saatchi, who to her shock drove up in a Jaguar one day, just as she was tucking into a jam doughnut.
Back then, Lucas had a reputation for wildness. According to the late writer Gordon Burn, a close friend, she was ‘the most unabashedly all-balls-out, rock’n’roll of the YBAs’: a fixture at the Groucho Club, out-drinking everyone in her tatty jacket and trainers, refusing to gussy herself up in dresses and heels but instead relying on her gift of the gab, what she describes to me as her ‘genius for sarcasm’. This image of toughness, of grungy masculinity, was cemented by her famous self-portraits, in which she looks androgynous, uncompromising, powerful, hard: sprawled unsmiling in a chair with two fried eggs slapped casually over her breasts; crouching on a toilet seat with no knickers on, a cigarette in her right hand.
In person, twenty-five years on, she’s warmer than these swaggering images suggest. She’s dressed in an oatmeal sweater and grapefruit-coloured Pumas, her socks tugged up over her jeans, hair unbrushed, a cut on her nose. She says she’s ageing, rues the streaks of grey, but what’s most noticeable is her face-splitting smile and almost frightening charisma. Unadornment is at the core of her appeal. The gallerist Sadie Coles, who’s represented Lucas since 1997, told me that when they first met, at a ‘fairly formal’ dinner party, Lucas was wearing a T-shirt with rotted armpits. ‘She looked amazing. There’s no pretension. You’re confronted with her straight on.’
She’s only just come back to the city, to start work on her commission for the British Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Her house is being renovated, the carpets covered in plastic, the air full of dust. We settle upstairs, in a book-lined room filled with packing cases, for a conversation punctuated by the pouring of wine and the click of her cigarette lighter, the passing traffic in the soupy London dark.
The work she is making for Venice will return to the subject of feminism, a preoccupation that dates from the very beginning of her career. She’d never given it a thought until she graduated from Goldsmiths, when of all her art school contemporaries it was the men who she remembers being ushered into success, while she felt herself to be stuck on the sidelines, irritable and resentful. ‘It was like all the blokes seemed to be the darling boys of London.’ In response, she gave up art altogether, a decision that soon restored her sense of freedom. It wasn’t long before she started making things for her own amusement. ‘I felt like I was getting interested in myself.’
Her first show, Penis Nailed To a Board at City Racing, was, Coles recalls, ‘incredibly effective in terms of communicating ideas through form’. Her next step, at the beginning of 1993, was to set up The Shop with Tracey Emin, an anarchic and short-lived studio-cum-gallery-cum-happening in a former doctor’s surgery in Bethnal Green. They sold their own work at bargain-basement prices (home-made T-shirts saying COMPLETE ARSEHOLE; ashtrays with Damien Hirst’s face at the bottom) and pursued intoxication with such commitment that she remembered once waking up on top of a mountain of empty bottles. Though the friendship, with its ‘almost violent, mad energy’, has since waned, the experience ‘brought so many people to us that it sort of expanded our world . . . We felt the tremendous power of it.’
Power. The word keeps coming up. Lucas is aware that she possesses it, both as an artist and a person; that she has a knack for making connections with strangers, even ‘just standing at a bus stop’. Some objects have it too – like her first self-portrait, the one where she’s wearing a leather jacket and biting into a banana. Her face is turned away, but one eye rolls back to gaze unwaveringly at the camera. She looks like Brett Anderson, even James Dean: a self-invented idol, not quite girl or boy.
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In 2007, Lucas took a deliberate step back from her careering social life, buying a house tucked away in the fields of rural Suffolk, the former home of the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears. It’s hard to square this decision with the hyper-verbal figure presiding over the Groucho and the Colony Club, but Lucas is aware that she’s composed of two parts, the bantering ‘people person’ and the more quiet, bookish self established when she was a very little girl. This inwardness runs deep and is one of the reasons she avoids interviews and exhibitions, those ‘looming’ commitments. She fell in love with the remoteness of Suffolk, its farms and ancient churches, as if she could grasp the ‘tail end of a totally disappearing world’.
The work she’s been making there is no less rudely physical, though it has grown weirder and more subtle. For Lent 2008, she and her partner, the artist and composer Julian Simmons, decided ‘to give up the outside world’, switching off their computers and telephones. It was out of this ‘magical’ time that she began to make Penetralia: plaster casts of phalluses of varying sizes, sometimes emerging from, morphing into or co-existing with natural forms like wands or trunks or flints. While her early works around sexual organs were assumed to be motivated by a desire to shock, these new pieces look more like ritual objects disinterred from the soil, the dick jokes of deep England.
Other recent work recalls the uncanny feminine of Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois. A chair made of hundreds of breasts, each one formed from stuffed women’s tights in shades of pink and brown. Snaking skin-like tubes and coils she calls nuds, which are emphatically fleshy without quite resolving into recognisable forms. They look like sausage meat, like mottled legs; you want to fondle them, and also to give them a wide berth. Some have been cast in bronze, a new material that emphasises their spooky shape, like intestines or excretions.
In 2000, Lucas had a show at the Freud Museum, The Pleasure Principle. Seeing her work in this context – a Bunny draped on one of Freud’s chairs, legs akimbo, ready or perhaps refusing to spill its secrets – begs the question of origins, of where all this material is rising from. While Lucas’s own story has fairy-tale elements, it’s very different from the aspirational narrative with which the YBAs, Emin and Hirst in particular, are customarily associated. She grew up on a council estate off Holloway Road in North London. Her parents were poor but creative, in a make-do-and-mend kind of way, and, she thinks now, haunted by their pasts. Her father, a milkman, had fought in the Second World War and been a prisoner of war in Korea; she remembers him singing the Chinese national anthem in his sleep.
Lucas’s mother, Irene Violet Gale, came from an impoverished family, who all lived in one room above a chip shop on Chapel Market. Irene’s father drank and beat her mother, who had a history of mental illness. During the war, she was sent as an evacuee to a Cornish family, who wanted to adopt her; her decision to return home to her abusive family caused what Lucas describes as the ‘great schism’ of her mother’s psyche.
Lucas herself didn’t speak until she was three, and remained very quiet as a child – something she suspects was related to her mother’s depression. Some years ago, she dated the psychoanalyst Darian Leader, who told her that he thought she’d failed to bond with her mother. She laughs: an unsentimental smoker’s cackle. ‘And I think that’s true.’
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Standing casually against a window in the room in which we’ve been talking is a urine-yellow resin cast of a toilet – one of a series she made in 1998 called The Old In Out, slang for sex. At once vulgar and restrained, it’s a classic Lucas, speaking of the most base functions of the body while simultaneously possessing a formal purity, an elegance.
It’s what you do with the rude materials that counts: a principle that Lucas has applied to both her art and life. For years, she was troubled by the likelihood that she would be doomed to re-enact her parents’ unhappiness. It took her friend and mentor, the curator Clarissa Dalrymple, to convince her that she needn’t repeat their lives. ‘It was such an extraordinary thought.’ She thinks the turning point in her childhood came when in her final year at primary school she got into a fight with a bullying boy who tried to steal her pen. She knew that she didn’t want to give in, so she grabbed him by the hair and refused to let go, forcing him to his knees. After that, her tongue was unlocked. A social, sardonic self emerged, bent on freedom.
She left school at sixteen, determined to make her own life and willingly assuming that the price would be poverty. Though a desire for fame and money often seemed to animate the YBA scene, these were not the driving force for her. Nor, unlike many sculptors, is she particularly compelled to make objects themselves, though she acknowledges it as an abiding pleasure as well as a ‘cluttering’ habit that causes mess. ‘Really the point of art for me was that I wanted to carry on talking and thinking with other people,’ she says: to create social contexts but also an ongoing, free-moving conversation about ideas.
Over the years, she’s experimented with collaboration, from making a gigantic masturbating arm as a prop for her friend Michael Clark’s 2001 ballet Before And After: The Fall to working with the German collective Gelatin, with whom she had a joint exhibition inspired by Bosch, In the Woods, at Kunsthalle Krems in Austria in 2011. Instead of shipping old works over, they spent the entire budget on making the show from scratch in the museum, a high-wire way of working she’s always loved. A group photograph suggests joyous misrule: four people are in horse suits, a bare-chested Simmons has a pair of Lucas’s nuds draped around his neck, while Lucas herself looks buoyant in a creased sundress and shades, her arms aloft and her feet planted very firmly on the ground.
Most people, she thinks, settle for such boring things: financial security, fame, material possessions. Happiness, I suggest, and she bats the thought away. ‘Happiness just comes and goes . . . Whereas I wanted to go somewhere quite mystical I think, but I haven’t been able to entirely invent this magical land for myself.’ She pauses, her legs curled under her, fiddling with her roll-up. ‘So maybe they saw reality for what it was,’ she says, ‘whereas I thought it was elsewhere.’