Sarah Lucas on being as provocative as ever There are occasional nods to her gender - white knickers hanging on a washing line, a pair of greasy fried eggs positioned so that the yolks evoke her nipples - but these touches feel confrontational and ironic, especially when coupled with her surly, blank expression. Lucas, it seems, is not the sort of woman who enjoys making herself up and tottering about on high heels. Nice Tits, 2001 (courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London) And so it proves today. She walks into St John Bread & Wine wearing a loose grey T-shirt and roomy stonewashed jeans - considerably less coiffed than the restaurant's other diners, who include the actress Keira Knightley. When I tell her that she is dressed as I was hoping, minus the fried eggs, her no-nonsense face erupts into a big grin, revealing flashes of gold. "I left my house in Suffolk yesterday morning in this T-shirt," she says, her voice gritty from decades of smoking. I slept in it all night, and I've still got it on. And it occurred to me on my way here that I've got to have my bloody photograph taken. Not that I would have dressed up. I'm very shabby. Shabbiness has always been part of Lucas's persona. "I had a lot of fun in the 1990s going to chichi places and being scruffy," she says, referring to the heyday of Britart, when she and her friends caroused like rock stars. "I could go out and not come back for five days," she says. Now I can't be bothered with that, but I still only want to wear this T-shirt and these trousers. Au Naturel, 1994 (courtesy Sadie Coles HWQ, London) Shabby also describes those parts of London in which Lucas grew up and operated as a young artist. Born in Islington in 1962 with a milkman for a father ("He was the tit," she says, with a naughty laugh), Lucas gravitated to down-at-heel Shoreditch after graduating in 1987 from Goldsmiths College, where she was a year or two ahead of other successful Young British Artists including Damien Hirst and her former boyfriends Gary Hume and Angus Fairhurst. In 1988 she showed at Freeze, the warehouse exhibition organised by Hirst that launched his generation. "Everybody sold apart from me," she says. The reality of Freeze was that there was a bit more criticism between people. I can remember people thinking, "Oh, why is he in it?" Of course, everyone's got a competitive side, but sometimes it comes as a surprise to realise your own. Even now, I don't think I'm like that at all. But sometimes it jumps out. READ: Gavin Turk: the Young British Artist who has been raising hackles for 25 years In the wake of the exhibition, Lucas's competitive streak led to frustration, as she watched her male peers get ahead. Did she feel angry? "I did," she replies. After Freeze there was particular interest in Gary, Damien, Mat [Collishaw], Michael Landy, Angus. I was thinking, "Oh, it's all the blokes." It was a couple of years or more before it happened for me. She had to wait until 1992 for her first solo exhibition, in City Racing, an artist-run gallery in a former betting shop in south London. "It was unlike anybody else's show," Lucas's friend and dealer Sadie Coles says. There was a pushbike turned upside down, with a wooden plank resting on the wheels that made a shelf. And on that shelf there was a series of photographs of a man with vegetables covering up his delicate bits. It was playing with the male gaze, switching it on its head. That really grabbed me. I was a bit in awe of Sarah, to be honest, in terms of the strength of what she was doing and the clarity of her voice. That piece, Still Life (1992), set the tone for her work, which draws on the sleaziness of vernacular British culture. Turning everyday objects such as fruit and vegetables, fried eggs, cigarettes, fluorescent lights, nylon tights and scuffed chairs into surprisingly elegant artworks that are quick-witted and light on their feet, Lucas uses bawdy visual puns to comment on sex or death, or both. Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992 (courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London) In the early 1990s she was reading a lot of feminist books, and the Whitechapel exhibition will contain several ribald sculptures from this period, including Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992), which consists of just that, arranged on a wooden tabletop, forming an obscene representation of a woman reduced to nothing but her breasts and sexual organs, which are as disposable and cheap as fast food. Bitch (1995) transforms a table on castors into a woman on all fours, with pendant melon-breasts emerging from a torn white T-shirt, and a vacuum-packed kipper standing in for her genitals. IN PICTURES: Damien Hirst retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern in London In recent years Lucas has produced a series of "Nuds," which will also be shown at the Whitechapel: tights stuffed with kapok and arranged, puckered and twisting, like lust-frenzied limbs on top of breeze-block plinths. At this summer's Venice Biennale, she premiered several priapic bronze versions worth £120,000 each. Perceval (2006), a five-ton painted bronze sculpture of a shire horse pulling a cart containing two giant marrows cast in cement, sold out in an edition of five - the last of which went for £1 million. Lord Rothschild bought one for the gardens at Waddesdon Manor. Perceval, 2006 (courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London) "I love her work," Damien Hirst, who owns another Perceval, and is Lucas's biggest collector, says. She's the opposite to me in the way she makes art and I envy that - she does it so seemingly effortlessly, and I always put big expensive boxes around things. She makes work like Picasso, putting everyday things together in unexpected and powerful ways. I would say she's the most important of the YBAs, but her work goes way beyond that small group. She's the greatest artist I know. IN PICTURES: Tate Liverpool's major retrospective of the work of contemporary artist Sarah Lucas Lucas will always be compared with her contemporaries, but I wonder whether it is more instructive to consider her work in the context of the city where she grew up. A Londoner to the bone, she makes work that is so frank, so immediate and bantering, that its salt-of-the-earth spirit feels as though it comes straight from the capital's streets. "Well, I am very partial to a pie," she says with a big laugh, uttering the word "pie" like a Carry On actor delivering a filthy innuendo. Having scanned the menu, she opts for pea soup followed by quail, accompanied by a bottle of house white. "I can drink, as you know," she says. I already had half a pint of beer on the way here. I am a much quieter person when I'm not drinking. Sometimes I seize up. And that's why I drink. How much does she drink? But I drink most days. I don't count my units," she says scornfully. When Lucas was starting out Shoreditch was much more dilapidated than it is now. "It has changed massively," she tells me. In some ways, I am nostalgic for shabbier times, but change always happens, and it's so exciting to have been in it when it was going on. The shabby thing was advantageous - it made life affordable. Cheap rent meant that for six months during 1993 Lucas and her friend Tracey Emin could run The Shop, a small outlet in a former doctor's surgery on Bethnal Green Road selling arty bric-a-brac including decorated mugs and key rings, as well as T-shirts hand-painted with slogans such as 'complete arsehole'. It was a period of exciting possibilities and all-night parties - and the intensity of Lucas's relationship with Emin fuelled rumours of a lesbian affair. Nud 18, 2009 (courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London) Last year, though, during an interview, Lucas described Emin's art as "second-rate." "I was cornered into it," she says. There are very few artists that I take a cue from - and Tracey and Damien aren't among them. But I felt badly about coming across as if I was taking a pop at them, because I didn't want to. So what does Lucas make of Emin's self-revelatory work? "I find it cheap," Lucas says. In the same way that I wouldn't wear high heels or lippie. The confessions and the puerile sex stuff - I just would never do that. Are they still in touch? Only when we run into each other. We do email from time to time. Tracey didn't even get particularly bothered about the second-rate thing - she got furious that I'd said she was in love with me. The funny thing is, she once said that about me, and it made me furious. In a way it was true, but I didn't like it. She used to make my blood boil, that girl, so it was quite funny I made her blood boil a little bit. READ: Tracey Emin - She Lay Down Deep Beneath The Sea, Turner Contemporary, Margate, review Although she owns a house in the capital, Lucas now lives principally near Aldeburgh in Suffolk with her partner, the artist, musician and poet Julian Simmons, in the former bolthole of the composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears. She bought it as a weekend place with Sadie Coles in 2002. "I moved out there six years ago - it's nice, impressive," she says curtly, before clamming up. I don't want people coming and snooping on me. When she was younger, though, surely she never dreamt that she would end up in Suffolk? "It was unimaginable," Lucas tells me. But I am less angry than I was when I was younger and things were harder. Now I feel mellow. Does she ever wonder, though, if anger fuels her best art? "Well, yes and no," she says. But it would be a terrible shame to become some angry caricature. I'm not going to do it. She pauses. "Can I have a fag?" she asks, producing a pouch of tobacco and a packet of rolling papers. I stopped smoking tailor-mades when I moved to the country - so inconvenient. Bunny Gets Snookered #1, 1997 (courtesy Sadie Coles HQ) Standing outside the restaurant, Lucas lights a cigarette. "You know, I hate being asked about art," she says. I probably look at other art less than practically everybody else on the planet. People talk about art like it's the most ****ing important thing in the world. Crikey! A lot of [recent] art seems very stiff to me - heavy-handed and contrived. It's just like an idea-dump. Whereas for me it's more of a thought process - I make most of my things on the hop. READ: John Kasmin remembers a trip with David Hockney in 1965 "Franz West was really original," she continues, referring to the Austrian sculptor with whom she collaborated before his death last year. He was one of the rare people who could really do it - like a conjuring trick. Franz could make a sculpture standing there," she continues, pointing at a patch of bare pavement. And I know I've got it too, because I look back at all the things I've made and it's amazing, because I'm never busy, I've never got a studio, and I haven't got anybody working for me. Where does it come from? She stares at me, her greenish eyes glinting with conspiratorial charm. "I conjure it," she says in a slurring whisper. It's an intuitive thing. Keeping it in the air. Another throaty giggle. I feel very happy. I like being me. This is subject to variation, but I was just thinking this morning: what a brilliant caper it has been - so far.