Kara Walker in Atlanta, Georgia, July 2015 after visiting Stone Mountain. Photograph: © Ari Marcopoulos

Kara Walker had her first major success as an artist with her intricate and compulsive black-and-white paper silhouettes of imagined scenes from slave history in the American south. In 1994, her room-size mural, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, won her international acclaim, and made her at 27 one of the youngest ever recipients of a MacArthur “genius” grant.

In the years since, she has continued to develop her private mythology, which dramatises and deconstructs racial and sexual stereotypes. This work has included last year’s A Subtlety, a vast sphinx-like sculpture made of sugar, which filled a derelict sugar warehouse in Brooklyn, and attracted more than 100,000 visitors. She is currently in London, at the Victoria Miro gallery, for a show that features a cut-out mural dwelling on the symbolism of Stone Mountain, a monolithic confederate monument in Atlanta, Georgia. She gave this interview last Sunday, in front of a wall of black paper, immediately before embarking on the cutting process.

You moved from California to Atlanta, Georgia, when you were 13. That seems to have been an abrupt and formative transition for you…

Yes. There is I suppose, historically, this seminal moment in the lives of African Americans where one becomes black. Frantz Fanon and everyone talks about it. There is a moment when you go from subject to object and I guess that was my moment. I think of California as golden diverse kind of period, which is not entirely true. But certainly in Georgia, in high school, things were very locked down into black and white. You were forced to determine your allegiance.

Kara Walker at the Stone Mountain monument in Atlanta, July 2015. Photograph: © Ari Marcopoulos, courtesy the Artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London

This show specifically dwells on Stone Mountain, a huge carved civil war monument. Why did you want to go back to it?

I was talking about confederate emblems to a friend, a photographer. This has been a big topic of conversation since the nine African American churchgoers were shot in South Carolina and I happened to mention that there is this mountain that I grew up in the shadow of, kind of literally. The mountain was claimed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 as their spiritual birthplace and the carving was proposed in 1916. It was finally completed in 1972. So we came down to photograph it, and this show arose out of that.

Have you ever shown your work in Atlanta?

No, I haven’t had a solo exhibition there since graduate shows. [Laughs] I thought maybe Atlanta will pay attention if I have a show about Atlanta in London.

The mountain was claimed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 as their spiritual birthplace

How come no gallery will show the work in the south?

I don’t know. Early on I had a letter from a museum in Mississippi that was interested to show my work but “not with the sex and violence”. I was like: I can’t censor it for you, it’s all in there.

Where did the impulse to make the cut-out murals come from originally?

I think it goes back to when I first got to graduate school. I was 22. I was writing to find my voice, because I didn’t talk very much. This kind of Marquis de Sade stuff started coming out of me, which I didn’t know was there. I was writing on a typewriter in an open studio. A friend later called those my Unabomber writings. It was a release that was very real, disruptive and secretive. I think the cut paper has that same quality.

The murals are both shocking and angry and sometimes gruesomely comic, the tone is hard to pin down…

Yes, I was looking at the identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s and thinking the idea of a single identity – the militant black woman, or whatever – wasn’t enough. At any one moment I felt like 13 different characters piecing themselves together. Some of it was coming out of bizarre lived sexual experiences I’d had with people who will go unnamed, some of it was, like, I don’t know, reading Gone With the Wind. The feeling I was left with was that it was probably my job to gather all those pieces back into one room. They were all pieces of me and they were unruly. There is a stream of consciousness thing that happens when I do the cut paper pieces. I am making the piece here in the gallery for that reason.

Negress Notes, 2015 by Kara Walker; watercolour and graphite on paper. Courtesy the artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London © Kara Walker

It’s a change of scale from last year’s sugar sphinx – how did you come to be working at that scale?

I was asked to go and look at this factory and see what I could do. I mean, in retrospect, making that piece was extremely pleasurable but it took me a long time to work out how to use that space. It was frigging colossal and it stank of molasses. The process was too rich in a way, brain chaos. In the end the piece had this kind of sparkly big life. The sphinx came about when there was no more time. I was reading this book, Sweetness and Power, and I came across these sugar sculptures called subtleties that they had at medieval banquets. Up until that point I had been thinking of finger-wagging doom-laden things about the history of slavery and sugar and America. It didn’t take into account what people wanted to look at. When I came up with the idea and made it, it reminded me of wanting to do the cut-outs, that sense of giving people something they wanted to look at, working with their attention span in a way.

Kara Walker In the studio, 2015. Photograph: © Ari Marcopoulos

Are you returning to the paper cut-out work with a sense of relief or trepidation?

There is a lot of trepidation, but that is partly because I am making it here in the gallery, and I have been thinking about it for two months and I haven’t started it yet. I have a load of drawings and things in notebooks but I don’t want it to be fixed, or solid in that way. So most of that will be discarded.

When are you going to start?

This afternoon!