It’s Sunday afternoon. The phone goes. I pick it up, expecting the usual oily voice from Delhi trying to get me to change insurers, but instead I hear a delirious Sam Taylor-Wood babbling away in all directions, like a river that’s broken its banks. Straining to catch her drift, I just about make out the words “big fight”, “incredible” and “so exciting”. It sounds promising. So I shout back into the babble that I will call her on a land line, then hit the info button that throws up her number.

It turns out that Taylor-Wood is in Berlin, where she has just watched Vitali Klitschko taking on Peter Samuel for the WBC heavyweight championship of the world. Or was it Samuel Peter? She can’t remember.

She’s new to boxing. What she does recall, vividly, is how dramatic and sweaty it was. Vitali was all over his opponent, battering him so relentlessly that poor Samuel refused to come out for the eighth round. Or was it the ninth? Afterwards, she fought her way through the many layers of hangers-on who were clamouring to touch the new champ and pushed him into his dressing room, as agreed, where she instructed him to sit still for three minutes while she filmed him. Vitali closed his eyes and did exactly as he was told.

Earlier this year, she had done the same thing to his brother, Wladimir Klitschko, the current IBF, WBO and IBO heavyweight champion of the world, who was boxing at Madison Square Garden, in New York. The two films of these gigantic Ukrainians will eventually be shown side by side in a diptych called 3 Minute Round. Taylor-Wood is not the kind of woman you would expect to be interested in boxing, so I ask what she hopes to express here. Magically, the phone line grows clear as a bell and I hear her answer perfectly: “The stillness of these great giants. It’s so beautiful.”

A couple of days before, I too had gone a few rounds with Taylor-Wood in her studio, a converted factory located in the Brit Art corridor of London’s East End, where she has effected the usual minimal transformation her generation insists on, involving stainless steel and granite. Pet Shop Boys have their offices downstairs. I am ushered into the sparser of her urban hangars and offered the choice of the black settees with which the room is furnished. Vinyl or leather? I go for the leather, because it is more conducive to rumination and because Taylor-Wood currently needs plenty of thinking about.

The week before we met, news leaked out that she had split up with her husband of 11 years, the elegant and ubiquitous Jay Jopling, creator of the White Cube Gallery. Normally, none of us would give a Damien Hirst dot for such a break-up — who in the art world these days has the balls to stick out a marriage? — but in their case it was surprising. They were one of the capital’s golden couples, seen together at every fashionable opening, he with his endearing Jerry Lewis grin, she with her impeccable sense of what to wear in the company of Elton or Kate or Sadie. I had them down as stayers. Then, at the opening of Statuephilia, the sculpture exhibition I have just curated at the British Museum, I asked a well-known British sculptor what had really happened between Taylor-Wood and Jopling. “Sam,” he sighed, rolling his eyes pessimistically upwards, “got too close to the movie world.” He saw no hope for her.

That is certainly not the way she strikes me as she darts efficiently from picture to picture and talks me through the many different sights that are going into her new show at the White Cube’s Mason’s Yard space. The impression I get is of someone so busy and driven, there is no longer much room left in her life for the usual interstitials — not even for sadness. Having recovered spectacularly from two bouts of cancer, Taylor-Wood seems thoroughly determined not to tolerate a moment’s downtime. Her eerie American lay-bys were photographed on a road trip to Georgia. The spooky clown loitering in an alley was shot in London.

The romantic landscapes were done in Yorkshire, near the house in which Wuthering Heights was set. See the two trees braced heroically against the weather? That’s Cathy and Heathcliff. And the Klitschko picture was made in New York.

Vitali and Wladimir are now the undisputed heavyweight boxing champions of the world, in unison, so the logical thing for them to do next is to tackle each other and see who wins. But that will never happen. The brothers, she reveals dewily, have promised their mother that they will never fight.

Searching for seams of vulnerability in the rich and famous has become her unlikely crusade. This, after all, is the woman who spent an hour in bed with David Beckham, filming him sleeping, and noticed the cute way his tattoos heave when he breathes deeply. Armed with the greatest address book in art, she’s on some sort of mission to humanise the inhuman.

What about this agitated-looking fox, Sam, the one pressing itself nervously against the skirting board of her studio, in whose eyes she appears to have captured a wild panic to be elsewhere? “That’s a self-portrait. I really love that picture.” She calls it 21st Century Fox.

Hanging around the room is a suite of more obvious self-portraits, in which Taylor-Wood, stripped down to her pants and a vest, shows herself floating miraculously in the air, suspended from garish clusters of party balloons. She looks like a fragile and discarded toy. A feather has more meat on it than she currently has on herself.

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