Unexpected moments can prove to be life-changing ones. For 30-year-old British artist Sarah Maple, one such moment was when a university tutor suggested she do a photography course, partly to gain course credits. While doing a round of “crits” — discussing each other’s work — she noticed something that made her “very angry.” “Every time the men stood up to speak, we listened to them… while when women got up to speak we berated them. We were taking men more seriously, subconsciously, than women.”

“It had never occurred to me before this moment that being a woman would hold me back,” she said, when we met recently in London to discuss the release of the first book of her work, You Could Have Done This . “I remember thinking ‘I wish I had a penis’.”

Back in 2007, she took a photo of herself, dressed in a long red dress and hijab (she was brought up a Muslim by her Iranian mother and English father) and holding a piece of paper bearing the words You Could Have Done This, and posted it online. “I finally realised that this was the kind of art that would allow me to say what I wanted to say,” she says. “It started so much — it still sums up so much.”

Since then Maple’s rise has been meteoric. Barely six months later, she won the Saatchi Gallery’s New Sensations Award. She’s held 10 solo exhibitions and numerous joint ones. Her works, many of them self-portraits, have garnered attention, praise, condemnation, even threats. A series of photographs of her in a burqa and hijab has attracted particular attention: in a stark black-and-white one she’s smoking, in another she’s wearing an ‘I heart Orgasms’ badge.

Feminism is her dominant theme. There’s ‘Menstruate with Pride’ — a painting of her standing proudly wearing a dress stained with blood, as people stand by and stare in horror. In one of her favourites, she’s holding up the sign ‘The Opposite of a Feminist is an Arsehole’. And there’s a series featuring Disney princesses: herself as Snow White, working in a laboratory, as Jasmine dispensing justice as a judge.

While her art is radical, she is disarmingly friendly and down-to-earth in person. She chooses the quiet basement of a sandwich shop for our interview.

“I realise that not everyone is going to be happy with the things I am saying or the way I am saying them,” she admits. At the same time, she’s come to believe that her best work happens when she’s herself, and stays clear of notions such as ‘high art’. “If you stick with who you are, you are going to get much further — that’s always my advice to people,” she says with a gentle laugh.

I ask her about the title of her book, named after a tongue-in-cheek piece she did of herself holding up those words. “You often hear people saying ‘oh I could have done that myself or my five-year-old could have done that,’” she mimics, in good humour.

While she makes light of the indignation her work has generated, things have been far from easy. Her work on her Muslim identity sparked a media frenzy, a brick through the window and a death threat. ‘The Opposite of a Feminist’ has attracted particular hostility, though she’s been surprised by the number of people who’ve acquiesced once it was explained to them.

She’s brushed off or even embraced some of the criticism. When one commenter put down her success to her being “attractive and Muslim” she put the statement up on her website. However, a recent Guardian piece led to another flurry of online interest, and she debated the pros and cons of reading the hundreds of comments with her husband, who had read them. “He asked me what was the worst thing anyone could say about you and I said, ‘that I am silly and just doing this for the attention.’” ‘Then you’d better not read them,’” he responded.

Her experiences with social media have, however, given her further material to work with. “In the past as an artist you might get a bad review but you didn’t have hundreds and hundreds of voices. When you have so many different opinions, where does that leave an artist? If you get affected by opinions all the time you don’t make anything — you are too busy getting stressed out by what people say!” She believes that the fact she’s not addressed her Muslim background in recent works may be linked to the backlash she’s faced in the past.

Islam will be an issue she returns to in a new project on freedom of expression and censorship, made possible by a scholarship she’s just won from Sky Arts. For her the trigger was the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the conversations that unfolded online. “There was so much bullying online and so much judgment if you didn’t want to say ‘Je suis Charlie’. I am going to reflect on my Muslim identity because I’ve got a new view of it now,” she says.

Just how that new perspective takes shape through the magic of Maple’s provocative images will be something to watch for over the months to come.

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