Box of tricks: Meet the bold face of make-up artistry

The first time I meet the make-up artist Alex Box, over a year ago, on a shoot, she's painstakingly painting an elaborate fluorescent design on to a model's razor sharp cheekbones. She's got a peroxide blonde bob, traffic light bright ruby red lips and her tiny frame is clad in a black body-con wool dress – it looks very stern and very Alaia.

Today, giving a make-up masterclass for MAC, her hair has dark streaks and is pulled back with a headband. She's wearing an Alice in Wonderland, slightly Victoriana frilled and lace-trimmed dress. In terms of personal style, as with her make-up, the 36-year-old Box is something of a chameleon.

There are about 50 make-up artists crowded into a back room at St Martins Lane hotel to watch Box execute a couple of looks using MAC's make-up artist friendly paints. The Michael Nyman soundtrack from Peter Greenaway's The Draughtman's Contract is playing and her first look, somewhere between Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth I, wouldn't be out of place in a Greenaway period drama. She plasters the model's face completely in lead white foundation, then blends a pale terracotta, bone shade around the eye socket and under the eye. She presses a little old rose colour blusher into the hollows of the cheeks, then draws on thin high semicircles of Dietrich-style eyebrows above the eyes, finishing with a beauty spot on the cheek.

Alex Box is one of the brightest new make-up artist talents to emerge since Pat McGrath. A former fine artist, her style is theatrical and conceptual and like McGrath she treats the body as a canvas for her fantastical visions. "I would call myself a conceptualist," she agrees in her very down-to-earth northern intonation.

Although she's worked for certain Peter Jensen, Biba, Anne Valerie Hash and PPQ shows, she's best known for her work with Gareth Pugh, and has created looks for every one of his startling performance art catwalk shows. For Pugh's debut autumn/winter 2006 show, she turned models into post-apocalyptic harlequins reminiscent of some of Richard Sharah's commedia dell'arte work for David Bowie's "Ashes To Ashes" video nearly 30 years ago. For Pugh's autumn/winter 2008 show, the make-up was nuclear warfare meets The Wizard of Oz: ashen faces, bright smurf-blue lips, turquoise cheeks, cerulean blue thin, high pencilled eyebrows and jewelled blue streaks across the eyelids. It was truly beautiful in a kind of old Hollywood meets alien life forms way. "I tend to go and meet with Gareth when he's halfway through a collection," says Box of their relationship. "I try stuff on, feel the fabrics and hear what he's got to say. Usually he won't say much. It's a word or a feeling and the rest is me interpreting it."

The same could be said of Box's make-up: some of her looks for shoots have involved elaborate patterning, quite breathtaking in its intricacy, drawn upon the face. One such shoot – all black curlicues swooping over the face and neck – looked part Maori anthropologica, part Dr and the Medics gothika. The patterns are so perfect they almost look stencilled. "I hardly stencil anything," she explains, "I do it all freehand. The minute you start using stencils you've got a pre-conceived idea of what you're going to do." Having watched Box do make-up for a shoot she doesn't seem to always have an exact idea of what the end result will be.

Box's history as a fine artist (she attended Chelsea College of Art) has coloured her approach to the job. But her love of cosmetics pre-dates her career as an artist. Growing up near Grimsby, she would steal her mother's make-up and put it on her teddy bears. Her formative experiences experimenting with youth subcultures have informed her identity up to this day. "I've never stopped being a goth," she admits. "I think I'm black on the inside." When she was nine her cousins, who were "alternative" dyed her hair pink and orange. Later on she got into ska and rude-girl fashion graduating to become a psychobilly for a few years: "I had a shaved head with a quiff." She then alighted upon punk before settling down as a Siouxsie and the Banshees/Bauhaus/Cure-loving goth aged 17. "I was not interested in looking like anyone else," she remembers. "My parents have always encouraged me to look as different as possible." Her mother was a home help and her father a motor mechanic, who used to ride around the village on a unicycle.

Box's fine-art career began at Chelsea. First she painted and then later moved into installation art, making three-dimensional, site-specific works. As the years progressed her art became "quite broad" and she started using make-up and paint on bodies as part of it. After college she participated in a few group shows then landed a job at Shu Uemura in Harvey Nichols. "They would tell me off everyday for having weird clothes or make-up or hair. It was like being at school," she remembers. While working in the Covent Garden store she met the session hairstylist Rudi Lewis, who worked at nearby hair salon Windle. They did some test shoots together and soon she found herself signed up by an agent at The Industry. Coincident to this, in 1997, she did her first show for her boyfriend's (now defunct) fashion label Suture. "I liked the instant response to make-up at a catwalk show; it was like artwork, people either go 'yeah' or 'no'." Her move into make-up artistry was now complete.

Ten years on and Alex Box has done editorial and advertising work with a raft of the world's top photographers including Karl Lagerfeld, Richard Burbridge, Miles Aldridge, David Sims, Paolo Roversi, Warren Du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. She's currently working on a book with Rankin, in which she is playing out her most extreme make-up visions. The book will include drawings and sketches by Box as well as make-up on models. "Everything is fantastical, I'm going to do sculptural things and masks and body art. I want to do a book people will be inspired by, like an open sketchbook."

She's also the creative director of a new make-up range called Illamasqua, debuting this autumn in Selfridges. The brand is manufactured by Kryolan, a company with a strong face- and body-painting aesthetic, which established itself in 1920s Berlin. "Illamasqua is about harnessing your alter ego and it's based on film, theatre and music." She enthuses, "It's art deco, noirish fantasy make-up." The ideal match then for a self-confessed gothic, former fine artist. Alex Box's conceptualism is as thrilling as make-up gets.