A portrait of the artist in 3-D

Artist Sara Hughes' maze-like work asks questions about inner space. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Sometimes people look at Sara Hughes' paintings and ask her whether she's been taking mind-altering drugs. You can see why they might. But then you look at Hughes, who manages to be both beautiful and demure, look again at those works, observe how meticulous and controlled they are, and think: chance would be a fine thing.

I had high hopes she might turn out to be quite stroppy. She left a message confirming our interview time and requesting that we didn't identify where her studio is.

We were hardly likely to publish her address, but she's a bit nervy about such things, apparently, because she shares the space with her husband, Gregor Kregar, the sculptor, and "it is quite a private sort of space". Then she said the studio was a bit chaotic at the moment - they are both preparing for exhibitions - so she would "just like to have a say" in the sort of photo taken of her.

All of which was promising, in a bossy, slightly paranoid sort of way.

When we do turn up at the top- secret studio door, I tell her it would be quite difficult to describe where it is anyway. She looks a bit abashed and mutters something more about it being private and so on. But she is friendly - and in the end didn't attempt to have any sort of say in how she was photographed. She was sweet and amenable and proved very good at posing - something hardly anyone is good at.

This takes considerable confidence, which you can tell she has from looking at her work.

After the photo, we go to a cafe and, while I am looking at her, it is the changing, folding in on themselves patterns of her paintings I can still see. This is quite a good thing from my point of view, because she has one of those faces other women are envious of. Also, she is slender and elegant. The owner of the cafe stops by to say: "How are you, famous lady?" She looks faintly mortified, while I grin and parrot: "Famous?" "In my own little world," she says, mocking.

She may not be famous, or not yet, but she is certainly having a very good year. This week she won the Paramount Award at the Wallace Art Awards. She gets a cheque for $35,000, part of which goes towards an overseas residency. She also, although she doesn't mention it, won the 2D (which is painting, photography - anything two-dimensional) section of this year's Norsewood Art Award.

She is very good, but if you ask when she first knew she was good, she says, "I don't know if I am good ... I think maybe if I thought I was good I probably wouldn't keep making work." Which is not the same as the necessity of having "some sort of self-belief. I think as an artist you have to believe in what you do because no one else is going to believe in it - especially to start with, perhaps."

She likes patterns and playing with space. God knows how she's done these recent paintings. They do your eyes in, with their repetitions. Making them must be like painting in a maze. I ask her what the inside of her head looks like and she obligingly tilts her head forward and says, "You can have a look".

Then, seriously - because she is a very serious young woman - she talks about how "the contemporary society we live in is so full of a bombardment of images that I think most people's heads look quite sort of fragmented. So maybe in my head there's quite a lot of aspects of other sorts of space, like a cyberspace world. So maybe in my head there's a lot of questioning about space and how we conceive space."

I told her what I felt looking at her paintings and she says, "These particular works, sometimes you feel like you're moving in and out, or the space is pushing back on itself, or it's sort of contorting".

You can also tell quite a lot about the artist by looking at her work. Not in any autobiographical sense, "or so much about me personally", she says. I'm not so sure. She was meticulous (my word) even as a child, although she prefers "probably quite organised. Yeah, I guess, that's an aspect of how I operate."

She and Kregar featured in a Metro story recently about young homeowners. They live in Avondale. In a new house. The gist of which was that is not the sort of place you'd expect artists to live. Artists are supposed to live in cool squalor. I didn't want to say that young artists - she laughs and says you can be a "young artist" until you're about 45; she is 34 - are a bit boring.

So I settle for asking whether they lead clean, dull lives. "Oh, not all of them," she says. But she does. She had already attempted, and failed, to convince me that "If you come to the studio some days, you'd think I'm completely un-ordered".

You suspect her idea of mess might not be other people's. She says she is the "typical" oldest child, of five, "the driven, obsessive one". She is very controlled, I say. "And I didn't say controlling."

"I might be that as well, actually," she says. "You'll have to ask Gregor about that. I think there's definitely aspects of control in my nature, or I wouldn't do the kind of work, or I wouldn't do what I do."

What she does is work. I ask what she likes to do when she isn't working. And she says, "Hmm. I don't really do anything. I'm quite boring. I think I'm actually quite boring, Michele, sorry. People say, 'What have you been up to' and I'm like, 'Oh, I've been at the studio'. We go to openings sometimes and look at other people's work, talk about art to other people. Probably a little bit obsessive, sometimes."

I ended up liking her as much as I like the art. But then she phoned again and wanted her quotes sent to her. She says she's been misquoted before. This is what tape recorders are for. I thought we'd got on well enough to cajole her out of this, so I say: "Are you being controlling again, Sara?" But she's gone madame-ish and says in future she'll make sure this condition is met. She'll learn from this mistake, she says. I hope she does because she's nicer and smarter than this makes her sound.