Sarah Lucas: Britart's original bad girl speaks out

Sarah Lucas hasn't changed. Well, she has, but since she always wears ill-fitting jeans, with baggy, unremarkable tops, you could be forgiven for not noticing whether the ensemble she's wearing today is any different from anything you'd ever seen her wearing before. Lucas's art has really changed though. Of late, it has taken a new direction.

At her home in the Suffolk countryside, Lucas is making the final preparations for a new show in London, her first solo exhibition in the capital for six years. The very fact that all of her recent sculptures can all be comfortably contained in a single domestic room signals a decisive change in scale, at the very least.

Lucas has always used found objects in her work and, when she was living and working in an urban environment, those sometimes included items as hefty as cars and lorries – and even these huge things could be covered in neat rows of fags, an artistic material and technique that is particular to her and no one else.

The new works, mainly cast in plaster, are little – sometimes only a few inches high. Some await packing in the music room – so called because it is the place where Benjamin Britten, a former occupant, housed his piano – and some await final touches in Lucas's studio, a simple wooden structure with a den-like upstairs hidey-hole that she's had built in the garden.

That's a change for Lucas. Previously, she's never had a studio of her own, but has always shared one with another artist, or worked from home. But some aspects of her new work are no different from the old, despite appearances. Lucas is using the materials that she sees around her in her art, just as she always has, and she continues, as she has always done, to employ techniques that "get the job done" as simply as possible. It's just that her gradual move to the country from the city – at first, spending weekends in the place she bought a few years back with her great friend and agent, Sadie Coles, and eventually finding herself there permanently – has dictated a change in the objects that are at hand.

"I never wanted art to be a job," she explains. "I didn't want to be commuting into town to work, like I was working in an office, then coming here to chill out. I have more money now than I ever did before, but in many ways my life is the same. I don't want loads of people in my life to look after things. I don't want making art to be a business. I don't want to employ people. I've never wanted that. That's never what it has been about for me."

So her inspiration, now, comes from the things she finds in the fields around her home – pieces of wood, chunks of flint - and from the intimate presence of her newish boyfriend, Julian Simmons, with whom she is now working collaboratively. Her all-encompassing relationship with him, she describes with tender, romantic honesty, is "like a dream come true".

At the age of 46, Lucas may be absolutely certain about the recent turn her personal life has taken. But she is uncharacteristically nervous about her upcoming exhibition. Her essential approach may be no different from that which bore her with dizzying speed to the forefront of the exploding British art scene in the early 1990s. Yet the rural setting in which she now works has imbued the sculptures with a sense of timeless peace that is quite alien to all that has gone before.

Previous sculptures felt urgent and contemporary, bawdy, almost vulgar, in their depiction of women and men as the sum of their sexual parts. In the past, after all, Lucas has used melons or fried eggs to represent breasts, buckets or kippers to denote vaginas, and cucumbers or fizzing lager cans to evoke penises.

These new sculptures, collectively titled Penetralia, retain explicit sexual references. But the penis is now represented by nothing more ambiguous or metaphorical than a penis – Simmons's penis, cast in plaster. In these works, the phallus is granted potency, as much potency as it is granted in the ancient fertility symbols that these objects deliberately call to mind. It feels like a contradiction, even a disavowal, of her previous artistic statements, this reverence for male sexuality that the new sculptures suggest.

Lucas is fully aware that the new work could be read as a rejection of the old work – even though she doesn't see it that way – and she's nervous about exposing it. She employs typical bravado in insisting that no one's else's opinion matters, except for the opinions of those who are close to her. With unconscious thematic exactness, she dismisses the possibility of a harsh reception as "sticks and stones".

But when pressed, she admits the obvious – that she does care, very much – and that she will be hurt if people stop believing that the things she wants to say are worth hearing.

Chopping at garlic, as she makes lunch in her old-fashioned kitchen, she talks more reflectively about the leap of creative faith she feels she has made. "Well, I don't know, I may regret this ... but I can't really imagine it. When I was just pottering about over there," she gestures out of the window towards the studio, "I was doing it for myself and it was fine. But when I took on this show, there was a moment when I thought, 'I'm not sure if I've got the time to do what this takes,' because ... they're quite hit or miss in a way ... some of the things ... and I thought, I don't know if I can do enough. And they're small things, so you need a certain amount of them.

"But it wasn't even just that. I thought, 'I don't even know what these things are', almost like they are characters, and I don't know who they are yet. I had a moment of sort of ... panic about it really. But it's a weird thing when you're making things really, because you do go through a self-examination."

That self-examination, this time around, has been particularly difficult for Lucas, because she found that the process led her to think very hard about Angus Fairhurst, the former lover, long-time on-and-off collaborator and close friend who committed suicide in March.

"This time, when I went through this self-examination I couldn't help but put myself a lot of times into Angus's thoughts and see things the way he did." Lucas believes that part of the trouble that drove Fairhurst to self-destruction was that he couldn't "let go" of feelings of comparative failure. He couldn't stop looking at the greater success his contemporaries had had as artists, she thinks, and finding his own more modest success a kind of torture.

She always understood that Fairhurst had such feelings. But she says that she didn't quite realise how dark and serious they had become. "You can't see it, not really, when things are all right for you. Then, when they're not, you become aware of what a horror that can be, and how out of hand it can get. And you know that you're doing it to yourself, and you know that having those fears isn't helping. That you've got yourself into such a situation at all is a real handicap.

She tries not to regret that their own long relationship came to an end, even though they remained close, and the two of them collaborated with Damien Hirst, in the huge Tate Modern show In-A-Gadda-Da-Vidda in 2004. She clearly goes back over it all, wondering if it could have been different, even though she knows she did the best that she could.

"Me and Angus used to wind each other up so much, and I do think, if only we could have ridden out each other's discontents a bit more, not got defensive when the other person was ... doing whatever they were doing... how easily it could have been gotten over. But we weren't those people, and we couldn't help each other. Now, I can see ways in which we could have helped each other more. And we would have, if we could have, but we couldn't because – we couldn't."

Often people feel angry when those close to them kill themselves, and Lucas tries to avoid giving in to that. But there is frustration, when she talks about the talents and gifts Fairhurst had, the broad network of affection and support he could draw on, and the bleak fact that none of this was enough to sustain him.

Lucas feels that there are connections between the work she is doing now, and the work that was displayed in Fairhurst's final show (he hanged himself from a tree in the remote Scottish countryside with a ladder he made himself, the day after it had closed). She shows me the painting reproduced on the invitation to that last exhibition, and talks very tenderly about the delicate intricacy of the work, and her irritation that Fairhurst's creativity alone could not sustain him.

"Perhaps Angus cared too much for what other people thought, she says. "He couldn't quite find his own strength of conviction, I suppose. Angus didn't get enough back from his work. I think he did feel he had fallen behind other people and he was always trying to bridge that gap. And that's not a satisfying place to be because you're doing it for the wrong reason."

Even before Fairhurst's death, Lucas had been troubled by the competitive aspect of the contemporary art world – the celebrity-driven character it had taken on, the money that was sloshing around in it. She prefers not to voice her misgivings too much, because she remains very attached to the people who, individually, and alongside her, wrought the change.

But she has slowly withdrawn from the ever more opulent and wealthy art scene in London. When she was younger, Lucas was an enthusiastic participant in the free-wheeling, hedonistic, party-throwing lifestyle that was an early hallmark of the group that became collectively famous as the Young British Artists, or YBAs. In the early days, there was a do-it-yourself, collegiate attitude among the artists, which Lucas loved. As the milieu and the people who populated it have changed, she has found it more difficult to feel at home in that community.

Long before she became so devastatingly aware of just how damaged Fairhurst had been by the competitive element that crept in, Lucas had spoken of her dislike for the Turner Prize, which became such a feverish measure of material success in British contemporary art.

"I never thought, in the first place, that it was about money, and I never thought the competition between things like whose prices were the higher, was important. Sometimes I still get a moment of shock about it all. Damien [Hirst] has given rise to that moment of shock in me a lot of times. Yet in a way he's right – that that is how people see it, and it is important, what your prices are. But I always thought it shouldn't matter, quite romantically and idealistically, like a teenager or a Communist." She shrugs and laughs.

"I can see things from Damien's point of view – 'other people have got this, why shouldn't I have it?' He was always like that, even at college. 'I'm going to eat something really good. I'm going to have that bag.'

"But he's a very generous and loyal friend to a lot of people and he believes in art. He becomes a more and more impressive person, just to sit down and have a chat with. He's brilliant, Damien, I really love him. But I don't want all those trappings. I don't want to walk around with, I dunno, plastic boobs and a designer dress on."

Certainly, the idea of Lucas with fake breasts and a designer dress is one that it is hard to conjure. The self-portraits that form an integral part of her body of work show her as she is. Whether she is glaring aggressively at the camera, fag in her mouth, loitering outside a public lavatory, fish thrown over her shoulder, or struggling naked with a cistern as she perches on the loo, she is always portraying a truth about herself and the world as she sees it.

In a way though, her own identity was one of Lucas's found objects, something she did not know was there to be used until she saw it herself – in an early photograph in which she is eating a banana. Those portraits came to be recognised as expressing the spirit of the art movement Lucas was involved in, and established her as the roughest and the toughest of the wild young things who were mounting such a fierce and successful attack on the status quo.

But they only told part of the tale. Most people have a protective carapace, an aspect of their personality that they put out in the open, to protect the more tender parts of their psyche that might not bear public scrutiny so well. It's not that the superficial aspect of themselves is a lie or a distortion. But it is often only part of a story that is unreadable without access to those other, more hidden places.

In truth, there has always been a disconnection between the way Lucas represents herself and gender generally in her work and the way she conducts her own private and sexual life.

The work, and the personal image Lucas has projected in her many self-portraits, portray a tough and androgynous female who, it might be inferred, accepts sex as a risibly uncomplicated, even abject exchange, driven by lust, and dismally mechanical.

In reality, though, Lucas has never been crassly vulgar or sexually promiscuous. She is intensely romantic, and reserved, almost courtly in her attitudes to her lovers, past and present. Her personal life she has never viewed as a suitable subject for banter or badinage – even though she loves raucous sociability. She appears in her own art, but it has never been autographical.

Instead, she plainly hates the way that some men objectify women, and the way that their sexual liberation has encouraged some women to respond in kind. The men in her own life have always been of paramount importance to her, and the connections she has sought to achieve with them have always been spiritual and intellectual as well as physical.

She feels that she has got that desire she has always craved now with Simmons – to be completely wrapped up in somebody. She remains, however, passionately engaged with the memory of Fairhurst, and annoyed despite herself about what she decries as "a fucking lack of curiosity about things on his part. He could have waited around to see what happens next. In a way, I think it was the worst part of him that killed him, the ambitious part. It got the better of him, which is a great shame because the good part of him was very great."

Fairhurst's death has clearly left Lucas struggling in some respects –why would it not? The experience has made her even more wary about those parts of the art world that are not entirely focused on art. "The whole of life is a mystery," she declares, with intensity. "Why would you want to be rich just to knock around in this gear, hang around with these people, have these accoutrements, and be in this club?

"The club doesn't appeal to me. What appeals to me is that life is a mystery – that there's a world and it's an adventure. I think I always wanted to go on the adventure, and take the leaps that you can take in the potential world.

"I feel more and more traditional, anyway, in what I'm interested in... conservative, not in a party political way. There's a lot of magic out there, and it gets harder and harder to see if you're in London. That's the point about making these things with these objects. You can't just dip in and out. It's a quiet thing, really."

And there stands Lucas, scared but defiant, brave but gentle, full of hope for the future, and the prospect of something new, that retains and expresses all her wonder and excitement, but is also suffused with contentedness and calm. Whatever she is seeking, you can only admire her faith in the idea that it is there, somewhere, for her to find.

Penetralia is at Sadie Coles HQ, 69 South Audley Street, London W1 from 14 October to 15 November