‘I box to exorcise the badness’: Sue Webster on boozy spats, her thrilling new work – and having a baby at 52

She was half of a 90s art power couple that seemed unstoppable. But they split and the trauma floored her. Now she’s back with defiant paintings celebrating her punk past – and late-career motherhood

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.