Sports Calendar

At times, she seems to be fuelled by the energy of suppressed fury at the unfairness of her early life, the lack of family love and support, especially from her mother (they are still estranged), and the harshness of the school regime, where disabled children were kicked around the office for a joke. “They’d make me wait for hours on end to go to the toilet. I wasn’t allowed to wet myself. They thought it was funny.” But Lapper doesn’t want to bore her audience with miseries past, even if her resilient positivity risks becoming a false smile. “My work is about liking my image,” she says determinedly, “and being proud of myself.”

Lapper’s relationship with the sculpture that made her famous is complex. Along with the pride of having been chosen by Quinn, there was also a frustration that the work grabbing all the attention wasn’t her own, a misfortune she ascribes not to different levels of artistic ability, but to finance. “I cast my own body way before Marc did, but I don’t have the money. That beautiful marble cost a fortune — I’d modelled myself with tissue paper and plaster of paris.”

She knows she has no claim on the piece, but can’t help feeling that its soul belongs a little bit to her. It was Lapper’s inspiring story, as much as Quinn’s vision and courage, that, in her opinion, “turned around” public reaction and made the piece so memorable. “I don’t even know where my sculpture goes,” she says, as if of a child on a gap year. “A friend of mine saw it outside a museum in Italy. But it’s not mine, is it? I didn’t realise when I did it that I would feel like this about it.” Would she like to have it in her garden? “I think it should have stayed where it was. Look at what’s there at the moment, Hotel for the Birds [a sculpture by Thomas Schütte], I mean, what’s that?”

With its painkillers and dependence, her life can sound a hard slog, though she doesn’t mean it to. She is a thrilled and doting mother, telling me about Parys’s first installation, involving pens, pins and a packet of biscuits — “He ate what he didn't need” — which is nailed to her wall. She is all too aware that the other side of discrimination is a suffocating sainthood that doesn’t suit her rebellious, mischievous self at all. If she wishes to avoid the pedestal, however, she is only too keen to climb back on that plinth, an ambitious contender for Antony Gormley’s parade of living statues. “I’d love to be back up there.” She grins. “Do you know him at all?”

The Young Brits at Art prizes will be presented on July 2 at the Southbank Centre, SE1. The 100 shortlisted entries can be seen at equalityhumanrights.com/art, and Lapper’s art at alisonlapper.com

Editor's choice

• Alicia Keys lets rip
• Streep and Baldwin get complicated
• Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes