Sam Taylor Wood is keen to show me a work hanging in the lobby of her artist’s studio. It’s a large photograph, in which she’s standing on tiptoe on the back of a chair that’s toppling over, sending her slim frame falling headfirst. On a wall behind, the shadow of the chair has been erased, leaving her frozen silhouette arcing through the sky. The disastrous plummet becomes a victory roll.
She’s titled it Bram Stoker’s Chair and thinks it’s “unnerving”. But it also serves as an astonishingly apt self-portrait. Over the past decade, the 39-year-old glamour girl of the Young British Artists’ movement has had her unfair share of toppling: first she survived major surgery for colon cancer, only to have breast cancer diagnosed three years later, which required a radical mastectomy. She has since had her breast reconstructed. To add further peril, she then refused a potentially life-saving drug regimen because it would render her infertile. But now she’s been declared clear of cancer — and she’s three-and- a-half months pregnant. Blooming with it.
Taylor-Wood’s best-known work, her film of David Beckham sleeping, will feature among the exhibits at the British retrospective in Gateshead’s Baltic Centre that she is busy finalising. It’s her last burst of industry before she takes a baby break until Christmas.
Morning sickness has taken its toll, she says, but you wouldn’t guess. Her clear, pale skin is perhaps just down to genes but more likely it’s testament to her life of dairy-free food, yoga and acupuncture. Only the few lines below her eyes might suggest that life hasn’t been a plain sail to the brink of 40.
The pregnancy does not only bring a muchwanted companion for her first child, Angelica, 9, it’s a vindication of her decision six years ago, after breast cancer, to take her health into her own hands.
“I did all the chemo for six months and then I thought that was enough,” she says. “I did not want to take drugs that would put me into early menopause. After that, it was up to me to take the next steps.” Here she is, in loose shirt and jeans, lit up by sunlight from the windows of her studio in Clerkenwell, East London (it looks more like a lifestyle loft advert) talking about refusing cancer drugs as though it were as simple as changing your brand of washing powder. But surely?
She’s non-stop genial company but here her voice takes a steely edge: “I was determined. I consulted lots of doctors and experts and they all advised me against doing it. It cost me lots of sleepless nights. I read Jane Plant’s book about having no dairy in your diet and I thought that diet was going to be the radical change that would help me.” Plant’s Your Life in Your Hands (Virgin Books, £9.99), argues that dairy food is a key reason why one woman in eight in Manhattan gets breast cancer and one in ten in Britain, but only one in 10,000 in Asia. Anyone who has tried to cut dairy quickly realises that it’s all but ubiquitous in British food. “It’s very difficult,” she says. “Diet-wise I’ve become very Japanese about it. So many things contain dairy; biscuits, croissants, everything that you want and crave has some sort of dairy.”
Many people, of course, become healthy- living evangelists after a brush with the Reaper but, for Taylor-Wood, the irony of falling so ill was that she was already “very yoga-and-green-tea. I didn’t drink that much or stay up late. Then the cancer happened and I thought: ‘What!’ Just before I went for the mastectomy, the nurse said to me: ‘You look so healthy!’ I wasn’t impressed but I believe having led that life did help me to recover better.”
Healthy living was the one positive legacy of a chaotic, hippy childhood in South London and East Sussex that culminated, when she was 15 , in her astrologist mother abandoning her to a yoga-teaching stepfather and hiding with a lover three doors down the road.
“I was a vegetarian at the age of 8. Then the parents went back to eating meat. I was the only one who carried on with it. I eat fish nowadays, though. When growing up, we were Buddhist one week, Christian the next. My mum told me once that I was a Hindu. I’ve chosen bits and pieces from each tradition. My true religion is my yoga practice, though that’s becoming increasingly difficult,” she says, looking down at her apparently bumpless tum. “I do energetic ashtanga yoga. Some of the more powerful poses, such as upside down, are going to be a problem.”
She also has regular acupuncture and practises meditation. “When I was undergoing chemo I would crawl into the acupuncturist a dribbling wreck and come out feeling renewed. It was a real testament to its effectiveness. I still go once a month and they work on my meridian points, correcting unbalanced energy and keeping it strong. When it’s really painful, I know I’ve overdone it: overtired and eating too much rubbish.”
The meditation is a bit more hit-and-miss, she admits: “Some mornings I manage it and it’s great. I wake up in the morning and just sit still, not thinking. It’s so beneficial for the whole day. Most days I don’t manage it, though. There’s a fantastic place, the Kailash Centre of Oriental Medicine, in North London, that had a Dalai Lama devotee who taught meditation. She’s from Hackney but ended up as a monk with all these Buddhist robes and with an East End accent. Brilliant. She reignited my interest.”
Now she’s found her regimen, she’s sticking with it, lest she turn into some Flying Dutchman of complementary care: “When you go through cancer everyone throws in their own remedies for you. You’ve got to filter everything out until you get maybe three things that work for you, otherwise your career turns into running around visiting homoeopaths and healers. I saw a few bogus people when I was seeking help but I had that sense about them immediately. Mostly it was about splitting off the well-intentioned from those who really will help.”
With five years of clear medical tests behind her, she is now free of cancer. But there will always be concern: “I’m now statistically as likely to get cancer again as anyone else. I decided to throw a party to celebrate but a couple of weeks beforehand I started to get fearful, in case I was somehow pushing my luck. On the day of the party, I got a chest infection that lasted two months and nearly turned into pneumonia.”
Her medical milestone opened the way to a more private decision — to try for a second baby with her husband, Jay Jopling, the art dealer and founder of the White Cube gallery. Some specialists feared that falling pregnant too soon could bring the breast cancer back. “I couldn’t do it until I felt 100 per cent sure — well, not 100 per cent, but comfortable enough,” she says. “The pregnancy was planned, so I was really excited, doing pregnancy tests every ten minutes.
“I do worry about the impact it has on my hormones. But I’ve got to push these worries aside and hope for the best, and try not to focus on it too much. I’m feeling good now, but the first three months it was really ‘Woah!’ Feeling anything less than 100 per cent makes you think that you might be ill again. I had to keep telling myself to calm down. I felt the same total exhaustion as I did when I was ill, but it’s normal for pregnancy, too.”
There’s one final health move afoot, though: helping to persuade her husband finally to give up smoking. Yes, after all the cancer happening right next to him, Jopling’s still on the fags. A new work at next month’s show might help, she says. It’s a seven-minute film, set in the smoky bar of Tracey Emin’s favourite East End local. “There’s five people in it and at first you think it’s a photograph because it’s completely still for five minutes, but then you notice movements, particularly one man’s cigarette burning all the way down,” she says. “I called it The Last Century because Jay smokes and I keep telling him that it’s so last century. He’s just a social smoker but I hate it, especially now that I’m pregnant. I can’t even bear the smell of it on his clothes. He is trying to stop, actually.”
Sam Taylor-Wood, Still Lives is at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, from May 17 to September 3. The exhibition is accompanied by the book, Sam Taylor-Wood, published by Steidl next month
