The Saturday interview: Sarah Lucas

It is surprising to find someone whose most well-known work is so urban – kebabs, fried eggs, dirty public toilets, grimy, paint-splattered walls, burned-out cars; so saturated with the sense of the London she grew up in – tucked away down a long country lane, behind a Baptist church in Suffolk. Even the local cab drivers seem to have a hard time finding the house, and so Sarah Lucas waits outside in the sunshine, barefoot, in a torn blue dress, dust caught in her unbrushed hair.

Inside, the main room is long and low. Two walls are made of glass, so the place is full of fields and sky and light. On the large dining table, surrounded by mismatched wooden chairs, sits half a glass of wine covered in clingfilm. There's a wood-burning stove, and bits of sculpture everywhere – a couple of large marrows sculpted in brass, another of concrete; a skull with gold-tipped teeth (like Lucas's own, they flash when she smiles); a pair of pert round breasts, perched like jellies atop shelves of music; small casts of her boyfriend Julian Simmons's penis, made for her show Penetralia, which opened in 2008; a big painting by Raymond Pettibon; huge red platform shoes and black fetish boots that she will cast in concrete and show in Krems, Austria in July; a general, seaside sense of driftwood and flotsam.

Lucas curls herself onto the large leather sofa and lights the first of a succession of rollups. She is nearly 50, but there is something girlish about her still – the angular kind of girl who will run through fields barefoot, who thinks nothing of getting her hands dirty (Lucas's fingers are stubby, workman-like); a grownup, slightly more masculine version of Sissy Spacek in Terrence Malick's Badlands. She talks directly, and thoughtfully, giving the sense, even when she has clearly had to explain a similar point before, of thinking it through again. Sometimes she makes direct eye-contact; more often she dips her head and hides behind her hair, or concentrates on her rollups, but she answers every question.

In the garden, a raised swimming pool glints in the sun (Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, who built the house as a bolthole, believed in the curative properties of a cold plunge every morning), and her new work, destined for the Aldeburgh festival next month, hangs in the glass-walled studio – literally hangs: the new pieces are mobiles, assemblages of buckets and plastic chairs and bulbous breasts and her trademark stuffed tights, "Bunnies", as she calls them, conjuring up a silent "playboy": certainly they have a playboy bunny's disturbing sexual passivity, sliding down chairs, ending in floppy pointed tips — no way of running away on those.

She has said that, making the first Bunny, she got that "'Eureka!' feeling, [where] you want to grab a beer or suddenly laugh, and smoke fags really fast and phone people up and say, you've got to get over here!"; more usually, she says, her experience of making art is an organic, random thing – playing with forms, looking for rightness.

Recently, she has begun to experiment with an evolution of the Bunnies: "Nuds" keep the sense of stuffed flesh-coloured tights, but are larger and more disturbing. She extrudes them from toilet bowls, hangs them from concrete blocks, wraps them round themselves, so they look like intestines, buttocks, breasts. The word comes from a phrase of her mother's, "in the nuddy", meaning naked. "She used to do things like sunbathe naked." She laughs, smoker-husky. "I did have an idea of putting my mum in it somehow. A bit."

Surprisingly, perhaps, for those who assume that, particularly earlier in her career, she always began with an in-your-face feminist statement, her starting point is generally the materials: what she can get in a particular place and time – food, concrete blocks, stockings, human bodies. (Of course, she was also perfectly aware of the feminist content, what it said about the disgusted-attracted-contemptuous male gaze, but she preferred the art to ask the questions, discomfit, not preach.) Or herself – the famous portraits of her sitting, legs splayed, fried eggs covering her breasts, or of her smoking a cigarette into a long ash, scowling in concentration like a female James Dean. Or people very close to her – the man in Still Life (1992), in which a faceless male holds a banana to his crotch – is Gary Hume, then her boyfriend.

Lucas was at the centre of the phenomenon that became the YBAs — showing at Freeze in 1988, in Sensation in 1997, partying hard and recklessly and well, at the Groucho Club, or at the Colony Rooms in Soho, becoming, as the writer Gordon Burn put it, "the most unabashedly all-balls-out, rock'n'roll" of them all.

But it wasn't always like that. Lucas, whose father was a milkman and whose mother, for a while, a part-time gardener and cleaner (she used to accompany her parents to people's houses, ogling at the furniture, the carpets, the coffee percolators), grew up on a council estate in Holloway, north London. When I quote the view that the Sensation show was a kind of coming-of-age for working-class women artists, she folds in on herself, hugging her chest, and denies the generalisation. "Someone like Tracey [Emin] had a background of quite a lot of ups and downs, really, in terms of fortune. [And] her dad was a sort of businessman. Whereas my family – they had absolutely no ambition. It just wasn't there. I remember my mum being absolutely against homework, 'because you're there all day anyway'."

She left school at 16 and at 17 was pregnant: "I suddenly realised," she once said, "if I had a child now, I would be in this environment for the next 16 years and not going anywhere." She had an abortion, and sold her record collection ("I didn't want anything I couldn't put in a suitcase. And I sort of thought I'd bought my freedom in that way") and hitchhiked through Europe, looking, fruitlessly, for an idea of what to do. When she returned her mother was working in a play centre, and got her a job. "I met somebody there who'd been to art college. I didn't know about art college before that. That's when I thought, 'Oh, that's something I could do.'"

But Goldsmith's didn't initially open any doors. "The first wave of people taken up by galleries were all boys. A couple of years later that really changed, but the initial wave was Gary, Angus [Fairhurst, who later became her partner], Mat Collishaw, Damien [Hirst], Michael Landy." She would go to openings, and fancy dinners, and come back to Hume late at night, drunk and raging at the unfairness of it all. "I had real ego problems. That seems quite harsh, but it did seem like all of my friends were doing quite well apart from me. I used to get really angry about it." Also, it seemed to her the only way to succeed was to have one idea and to do it to death, and, in disillusion, she decided to give up doing art at all. Which seemed to take the pressure off: suddenly she found herself tinkering with the kinds of ideas she has since made her own; her first solo show, Penis Nailed to a Board (1992), made her famous: "I had a great sense of achievement about it, that it was something different. But of course that gets assimilated too, very quickly."

The next year she set up a shop on Bethnal Green Road in East London, with Tracey Emin. They sold decorated key-rings, wire penises, T-shirts emblazoned with "I'm so fucky", or "fucking useless". "It was a certain kind of titillation the shop offered," the critic Matthew Collings has written, "sexual but also hopeless, destructive, foolish, funny, sad." And they built an intense friendship, "dangerous," as Emin once said. "There was electricity . . . Sarah's friends have said that when we were together it was like white noise." They are often still carelessly linked together, even though they see each other very little these days and many would describe Lucas as an anti-Emin: reticent, delicate and nuanced despite the initial shock of some of her work, and, according to quite a few critics, including this paper's Adrian Searle, the better artist; a "sleeper" who has shunned the limelight in favour of concentrating on and deepening the work.

She seems both proud of this difference (she has done very few interviews, over the years, which she says is both deliberate and born of disinterest; she has now lived in Suffolk, where she doesn't read papers or art magazines, for four years) and slightly niggled by it. I ask what the sudden influx of Saatchi cash and fame in the late 90s did to them all. Her response is tangential but revealing. "You know, [Damien] would say, 'You don't put your prices up because you're scared to put your prices up'. He'd scream it at me in top volume, sometimes. I never thought for a moment of doing that – or perhaps I was just sort of defensive about it . . . I mean, I really like the idea that art is not just its value, in the same way that everything else has a value. You might make a concrete sculpture, but it might be better than that brass one" – she points at the marrows – "even if the brass is worth more. That that's not where the value is. So the idea that if you just make something out of diamonds, or something, is so antithetical – it's just vulgar, really. Not that you can't make something out of diamonds, but unless it's more beautiful than the diamonds, it's vulgar.

"But then again, if you look at Damien or Tracey, obviously they were very clear about what their gift was. I think probably both Damien and Tracey really grasped the punk thing. They realised the value of being a brat and that it does actually work. And I don't think I did. I was more . . . proper about it, or something. And so's Sadie [Coles, her friend and dealer]. I can't imagine either of us ever wearing that sort of brattishness.

"If you're only polite – is that being scared of something? I suppose not – or is that thinking you won't get it? And is that being scared?" So he really hit a nerve. "Oh yeah, he did, definitely. But perhaps not as much as it does now, just seeing him and Tracey go so far with it. Whatever you think, they've sort of proved their own point."

A sense, then, that it's not entirely easy to stay true to her own instincts, which in some ways was the real breakthrough of her first show in 1992, and the thing about her work that her admirers tend to point out. The fact that she went back to the way she made things "when I was little, just making things, because I always did, to keep myself company. I think that sort of continues – the making things to keep yourself company." And perhaps to help her through the doubts.

Then, in 2008, her ex-boyfriend Angus Fairhurst hanged himself. Lucas believes that while he had a real darkness ("I remember him saying that when he was a boy he used to lock the dog in the cupboard so it would love him when it came out") a lot of what killed him was the extreme, sudden exposure of their generation, and the inevitable pullings away, into different stratospheres of fame and fortune that followed. Now, while his death is always there, it is particularly present when things aren't going well. "It sort of affects the gremlins, really, that. In the sense that I do have doubts and when I'm putting a show together, and the day goes badly, I'm thinking this is how he must have felt."

There are a couple of weeks until her new show opens. She is happy for me to see the work in her studio, but she makes a point of saying it's a work in progress. Not claiming it's there, or good, or right, but evincing a kind of trust that it might be.