Sue Webster is reminiscing about the boozy art openings of the 1990s. A hazy memory surfaces of Damien Hirst riding on Leigh Bowery’s shoulders, and of 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, along with her former partner in art, romance, and general punk rock spirit, Tim Noble, arrived in London in 1992 as the Young British Artists were rising to fame. Five years later, Saatchi stopped by their cheap live-work space in Shoreditch and, with his taxi still running outside, bought a light sculpture called Toxic Schizophrenia and a “shadow sculpture” titled Miss Understood and Mr Meanor. These shadow sculptures were meticulously assembled from junk and debris, projecting self-portrait silhouettes onto the wall when lit from one side. 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, who is from Gloucestershire, on their first day at art school in Nottingham. The pair, who created work together for over 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 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 disheveled facade of the home once owned by the infamous “mole man,” who dug tunnels under the streets from his basement until the road eventually collapsed. Her cat luxuriates on the under-floor heating as she walks me through her new works. The show is organized around Crime Scene, a wall-filling, confessional piece that links hundreds of artifacts from her life, starting from her teenage years. Siouxsie and the Banshees feature prominently, 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, handwritten mind maps, first seen in Webster’s 2019 book I Was a Teenage Banshee, which she says “helped me unravel who I was.” She was a Banshees-obsessed girl who didn’t come from an artistic background, although working for her electrician father later proved useful for wiring light sculptures. She likens her mind maps to wiring diagrams as well.
In 1980, at age 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 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 might have otherwise occurred to me. As a result, later in life I developed a vigorous training routine. I need to swim each morning or box at my gym most nights of the week to exorcise the badness that seems to build up inside and 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.She carried her baby with Noble. “I define that as the turning point in our relationship,” she says. “It was coming to an end, but we were still living together and I found out I was pregnant.” She was in her 40s. “And I said, well, I’m at an age where I have 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 told me to go home. I had to lie down and wait for the baby to come. I had to go into the hospital and then take this terrible pill, almost like a suicide pill, which separates you from the baby, and then they said you have to sit and wait to give birth. 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 from the walls of 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 from a leather or pinstripe jacket. She had Spider in 2020, when she was 52. She has said she was proud to reverse the “age-old cliché” that only men can have children late in their careers, and says she didn’t experience any judgment over 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.”
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 titanium white, you need rose red, you need Naples yellow, you need 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, customized 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 realized she couldn’t work with Noble anymore, 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…She felt that any personal projects she worked on in her spare time seemed insignificant. “I’m grateful for the chance to create the work I’m doing now,” she says. “It feels authentic to me. I wasn’t comfortable with it before, but I am now. And I believe the world is ready to see it.” Sue Webster: Birth of an Icon is showing at Firstsite in Colchester from January 31 to May 10.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs Sue Websters Interview I box to fight off my demons
General Background
Q Who is Sue Webster
A Sue Webster is a renowned British artist best known as onehalf of the artistic duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster She creates provocative and often neonlit sculptural works
Q What is this interview about
A In a candid interview Sue discusses her personal struggles with alcohol and arguments her motivation for taking up boxing her current creative projects and her experience of becoming a mother via surrogate at age 52
Boxing Personal Struggles
Q Why does Sue Webster say she boxes
A She literally boxes as a physical and mental discipline to manage her inner turmoil or demons which include past struggles with alcohol and emotional volatility
Q What were the drunken arguments she refers to
A She has spoken about turbulent periods in her past particularly during her longterm relationship and artistic partnership with Tim Noble where alcohol fueled intense conflicts
Q Is boxing a common way for artists to cope
A While not universal many artists use intense physical activity to channel creative energy manage mental health and create structure For Sue its a personal tool for resilience and focus
Motherhood Age
Q How did Sue Webster become a mother at 52
A She had her daughter Dolly via surrogacy This means another woman carried the pregnancy using an embryo created with Sues egg and donor sperm
Q What has she said about being an older mother
A She has expressed immense joy and a sense of rebirth stating that motherhood gave her a new purpose and perspective later in life changing her priorities
Q Were there unique challenges to having a child at that age
A While not detailed in every interview pregnancy via surrogacy later in life often involves complex medical legal and emotional considerations Sue has framed it as a profoundly positive lifealtering decision
Art Projects
Q What are her exciting new projects
A While specific projects evolve she continues her solo work often exploring themes of identity celebrity and light She remains active in the contemporary art scene with exhibitions and installations
