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

27 janvier 2026 à 07:00

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.

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© Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

© Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

© Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

‘I will finish your work’: one woman’s fight for the Jewish art and letters her mother saved from the Nazis

26 janvier 2026 à 15:35

Exclusive: Hundreds of works by the artist and poet Peter Kien have new home in UK after campaign by Judy King

They survived the Nazis, were confiscated by the communists, and for the last three decades they have been jealously guarded, bound in red tape, by a museum in the Czech Republic. Due to the attentions of an overzealous Czech customs guard and the vagaries of the British weather, a happy conclusion had been in doubt to the very end.

But last Thursday a small suitcase filled with 681 drawings, love letters, poems and manuscripts created by the Jewish artist and poet Peter Kien in the Theresienstadt ghetto in German-occupied Czechoslovakia between 1941 and 1944 finally made a blustery landing at Heathrow.

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© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

‘Waterfalls saved me’: how photographing nature can heal the soul

26 janvier 2026 à 11:00

John Arnison lives with anxiety and ADHD and finds busy cities unsettling, but loves taking pictures of nature at night

When he first ventured out into the darkness of the Yorkshire Dales 25 years ago, John Arnison’s only goal was to find a photographic style that people would immediately know was his.

Driving for nearly 40 miles from his home in Leeds to Malham, North Yorkshire in the dead of night, John didn’t realise that he was starting a project that would continue for another quarter of a century, and shape the rest of his life.

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© Photograph: Raphael Boyd/John Arnison

© Photograph: Raphael Boyd/John Arnison

© Photograph: Raphael Boyd/John Arnison

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