Eighty this year, Judy Chicago’s hair is white and violet, and she’s wearing lipstick so plum-dark it registers as black. It’s a strident image that suggests she’s a fighter, which she is: funny and forthright, she has dedicated a career to courageous exploration of difficult subjects, from catastrophic injury to mental illness. Some things, though, can’t be fought: extreme weather has left her grounded in New Mexico, thousands of miles from Gateshead where a survey of half a century of her work opened earlier this month. I end up talking to her on a video call.

This intervention of natural forces is grimly apposite. Chicago’s show at the Baltic focuses on extinction narratives and human responsibilities to the planet. She has spent the past three years contemplating mortality. The series The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction turns from Chicago’s feelings about her own death to grief over what we are doing to our environment. “There’s not a lot we can do about the fact that we’re going to die, is there?” she says. “We can’t do anything about our own mortality, but we can definitely do something about what we’re doing to the other creatures on the planet, and [to] the Earth.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest This is the end … study for How Will I Die? #2. Photograph: Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society, New York/Donald Woodman/ARS, New York

She really takes us through the fury, grief and terror surrounding ageing and death. From the tragicomic experience of seeing your mother’s body reflected back at you in the mirror, to the horror of dying hooked up to banks of machines in a hospital. She comes at death from many angles: philosophical, psychological and emotional.

“Far more difficult than the mortality images were the extinction images,” she says. “That was really gruelling.” Paintings in the series show tropical frogs and arctic fauna facing habitat loss; elephants and sharks mutilated by hunters; scenes of deforestation and animal illness. “Intensive research about it really brought me face-to-face with a level of horror that I had not previously comprehended.”

Death has long made its presence felt in Chicago’s life. Born Judith Cohen in Chicago in 1939, she married in 1961, while still a student in Los Angeles. Two years later her husband Jerry Gerowitz died in a car accident, making her a widow at 23. She started her career as an artist by injecting rainbow colour into the sombre arena of minimalist art. She learnt to wield a spray gun and painted crisply graphic symbols suggesting sex, fertility and birth on to the hoods of cars.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There’s a lack of awareness of the battles women have fought’ … Autobiography of a Year (detail). Photograph: Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society, New York Photo/Donald Woodman/ARS, New York

The art world of LA at the time was so macho that Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston and Larry Bell – the surfing, biking, cigar-chomping stars of the scene – were known as “the studs”. “The most prominent curator in southern California refused to look at my work because, as he said, he couldn’t deal with ‘the fact that I was a woman and an artist, too,’” says Chicago. “I mean, it was just terrible.” In order to get seen in LA she “absolutely had to disguise my gender in my work”. Yet, instead of hiding, she decided to be true to herself. “That meant confronting the fact that even though art has no gender, the art world seemed unable to accept me because of my gender.”

In 1970, an advert appeared in the pages of Artforum showing the artist leaning nonchalantly against the ropes of a boxing ring with the name “Judy Chicago” emblazoned on her sweatshirt like a prizefighter. The text read: “Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name: Judy Chicago.” And thus she was reborn: Judy from Chicago, like Leonardo, the guy from Vinci. She moved to Fresno and founded a feminist art programme at California State University. Instead of concealing her gender, she was going to change the status quo, one battle at a time.

And it was a battle. In 1975, Anaïs Nin encouraged her to write about her experience in Through the Flower: My Struggle As a Woman Artist. Rereading it today, she says, is painful: “There are very vivid descriptions of the difference between how I felt in my studio as an empowered individual, and how I would feel when I left my studio, and was viewed entirely through the lens of gender.”

The fight was not simply for women artists to be seen, but to lay foundations for a new kind of art making that stepped away from ideas of the lone male genius and his proprietorial dominance over the natural world. “I remember having a huge fight with Richard Serra in the mid 1960s when he did a show at the Pasadena Museum,” she says. “He had a bunch of redwood trees chopped down, and piled them up in the museum. I was horrified and I told him. The next day he pounded on my studio door, waving Artforum, and said, ‘You may hate what I do, but they like it.’ I didn’t care. I was horrified by that imposition on the landscape, that arrogance.”

At the time, Chicago was also making art out in the landscape, but she worked only with coloured smoke and bodies: materials that had minimal impact on the environment and left little trace. She always wants materials to sit lightly. That’s why she prefers spray painting: “I never liked oil paint, I never liked imposing paint on the surface.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An unabashedly erotic work … Chicago and her work The Dinner Party. Photograph: Roger Tooth/The Guardian

In the mid 70s Chicago started the work with which her name is now synonymous. The Dinner Party is a vast triangular table with place settings in lushly glazed ceramics and embroidered cloth for 39 eminent historic figures, all of them women. The triangular base of the installation carries 999 further names glazed into ceramic floor tiles, the entryway is lined in tapestries, and historic information is displayed around the space on panels. More than just a historic rebalancing, it is an unabashedly erotic work: labial, drippy, carnal.

Five thousand people attended the opening of The Dinner Party in San Francisco in 1979. It caused a sensation, but also uproar. The show was closed, and its exhibition tour collapsed. Yet the popular momentum accompanying the work was strong enough that a grassroots movement grew to tour it around the US and beyond. The Dinner Party is now permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum. It has become a canonical work, not just of feminist, but of 20th-century, art. At the time it nearly destroyed Chicago’s career. She says she lost everything: her studio, her marriage, and her financial security.

It is grotesque that The Dinner Party still feels so relevant 40 years later: that the same debates are raging about birth control, abortion and representation. “I think it’s incredibly sad that, at this point in America, young women are going to have to fight the same goddamn fight we fought in the 1970s all over again,” says Chicago. She quotes the historian Gerda Lerner – “Women live in a state of trained ignorance” – and says there’s a lack of awareness of the battles women have fought or the lessons they’ve taught. “As a result, we are still in the same cycle of repetition that I thought, in the naivety of youth, I was going to overcome by doing The Dinner Party with my own paintbrush.”

Chicago pulled back from showing much of it at Baltic: “Much as I appreciate all the attention The Dinner Party brought me, for many decades it blocked out the rest of my production.” But there is plenty of other work to look at, for Chicago is prolific: about 8,000 works are logged in her studio database, everything from bronze sculpture to paintings on glass. There are grand series exploring big themes such as childbirth and the Holocaust. And there are more intimate works, such as Autobiography of a Year (1993-94), charting her day-to-day mental state, or Kitty City, an “investigation of inter-species relationships”, set in her home and starring herself, her husband Donald and their cats.

She’s started to think about the art market and the value of her work, something she claims never crossed her mind until she got her first mortgage aged 60. “Now I’m 80, and, you know, in America it’s no fun to be old and poor,” she says. “So now I think I’d like to make some money, but other than that I never thought about it.”

• Judy Chicago is at Baltic, Gateshead, until 19 April.

