Lubaina Himid has been waiting for an exhibition at Tate Modern for a long time. She is currently 67 years old, and in 2017 she had the bittersweet honor of being the first Black woman to receive the Turner Prize, as well as the oldest artist ever (at 63). "I knew very clearly, in a way that you don't necessarily if you're 45, that I had more years behind me than in front of me," she says bitterly. You could believe that if you won it at 45, you'd have the same amount of time to try things, fail, and try again. To party a lot and live fast and loose. And I think at 63, I said to myself, 'Well, at the very best, I've got 20 years of making ahead of me.'

We're in Preston, where she's resided since she was 36 years old. She's a professor at the University of Central Lancashire, and the studio where we're meeting is in a Victorian building above the Citizens Advice Bureau, right in the heart of the city, overlooking the covered market and a short walk from the opulent Harris Museum. Aside from a few unfinished paintings in brilliant blues, oranges, and greens, her eyrie is tidy and white.

Hundreds of tubes of acrylic paint are arranged in rows on a table. An ancient handcart takes up a large portion of the floorspace, which she will utilize to create a piece at some time; there are also some old wooden drawers whose inside she has painted with male heads.

Wasn't the victory a huge boost, I wonder? "Of course, that's what happened," she explains. "I thought to myself, 'Do I have time to be this brave and exciting?' and then I realized I had no choice but to do it." And it's been fantastic."

The true turning point, she claims, came when she was picked up by Hollybush Gardens, a London gallery, in 2013. She'd been working consistently and effectively up to that point, exhibiting locally but not being recognized by the major urban institutions. That has all changed though, as her worldwide profile has risen as a result of displays at Wiels in Brussels and the New Museum in New York after the triumph.

She is enthusiastically attempting to "break rules" for the major one, at Tate Modern, she adds - a difficult undertaking. She is now confronted with the dilemma that once a piece leaves her studio and enters a museum, it ceases to be provisional – something she manipulates, modifies, and paints over – and becomes a valuable item. "You want to respond, 'It's just art,' or anything along those lines.

They do, however, treat it with the utmost reverence. Then you can probably anticipate the audience to be irresponsible with it. However, I am a firm believer in audiences. I'm attempting to make the audience think that they are the most important person in the room."

The whole exhibition is meant to resemble a stage set, with you, the visitor, as the protagonist, completing the works just by being there, much as a play exists in its purest form when it is performed in front of an audience. Magda Stawarska-Beavan, a close friend and colleague, will create a sonic element for the exhibition, pulling forth the sound that she thinks is latent in her work — "It's just that you can't hear it because they're paintings," she explains calmly. She points to a painting she's working on, a huge image of two ladies on a boat's deck. "Isn't the sea making a racket?" The birds are chirping, and the boat is groaning... "

Himid's art is designed to draw you in. There's always an invitation to join the party on the deck of the boat; or, if it's a piece like The Operating Table, in which three sitting ladies seem to be arguing how to create a city, you'll discover Himid has left place at their table for you to join them.

The paintings depict dramatic situations, but not in a grandiose way: no Chekhovian gun is inserted in her paintings that must, by definition, go off. Rather, she depicts the little, gestural dramas of everyday life, such as the ones she observes outside her studio window. ("If you're in Preston, scenes from Dickens or Hogarth: all life is here.") According to her, her paintings depict "private moments in public places." Small actions and modest talks may have a big impact on people's life.

Aside from her gatherings of capable women, she often depicts dandyish gentlemen, each "trying very hard not to be the most dominant man in the room." She points out that males are often shown possessing or controlling something in art history; her work, she adds, is "much more interested in how people are; people who don't often get painted." Guys with market booths, men playing dominoes, or men who have just cooked while the rest of the group is eating. There's drama in the mundane, even in the seemingly insignificant."

Her early theater background influenced a lot of her theatrical impulses. Himid's British mother met her Zanzibar-born father when they were both students. Her father, a teacher, died of malaria shortly after Himid was born, and they moved in the Tanzanian archipelago together.

"The beginning of my life was a terrible tragedy," she says flatly. Her mother, who died last year at the age of 92, moved her four-month-old child to the United Kingdom and resided in London. She was a textile designer who instilled in her daughter a love of patterns by taking her to museums and department shops (both, in their different ways, 19th-century temples to material culture).

On one of these journeys, Himid recalls viewing Bridget Riley's 1968 work Late Morning, which was exhibited behind three Giacometti sculptures at the Tate exhibition. ("I objected to them, it seemed to me, using the Bridget Riley as a backdrop for the Giacomettis.") "The sheer gall of Bridget Riley to say what she says with those paintings – to imagine she can manipulate you in such a way that you want to look, then can't look – that kind of: 'Come here... then fuck off,' she found herself struck by." They're the kinds of paintings that showed me what paint could achieve."

Despite this, she was attracted to pursue theatrical design rather than fine art – even though her lecturers were more interested in the velvet-and-gilt world of ballet and opera than in the more political, European theatre that she was interested in. (She now wants to collaborate with a theatre designer to construct sets for an opera or play.)

She did a little bit of everything after graduation, including waitressing, working in galleries, and designing restaurants. She began putting together exhibits of her and her contemporaries' work in restaurant venues. "I knew from an early age that African people, Black people, made art," she recalls, "but everyone around me told me that we didn't."

She eventually completed a cultural history MA at the Royal College of Art in the 1980s and began seeking out other Black and Asian artists. "Of course, they were working all over the country: Eddie Chambers, Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Sonia Boyce, Veronica Ryan, Sutapa Biswas... various of us gathered those people together and started putting on shows in different ways."

These and other artists of color, like Himid, have recently been thrust into the spotlight with high-profile exhibitions and projects; Sonia Boyce, for example, will represent the UK at the Venice Biennale next year, and Berman illuminated the Tate Britain facade with a light installation last winter. "They were always top-notch artists," Himid explains. "I believe some people could say, 'Oh, we're exhibiting them now because they've improved significantly.' Yes, but even I, without a Courtauld degree, could tell they were pretty excellent 30 years ago."

Himid is concerned that this present popularity is a fad rather than genuine advancement, but she also believes that "it's very good that a lot of those artists who were in their 20s in the 1980s are still making it" by younger [Black and Asian] musicians. Younger artists, on the other hand, I believe are thinking, 'Yeah, whatever.' I'm sure I can come up with something more fascinating, better, experimental, and dynamic.' I'm hoping there's no halting this momentum now."

Himid wants her show to be a place of chance encounters, a place where things could start to happen. "It seemed like it was somewhere you could make things happen, where things change, costumes change, sets change, locations change, emotions change," she says of the theatre.

When her work is on display at Tate Modern, you'll be able to view the backs of her lifesize painted cutouts, which will allow you to appreciate the reality that her work is frequently fashioned from common objects converted into art (boxes, old cardboard, bits of wood, old chests of drawers). Her work revels in – and revels in – its own deception. "What I want people to see is that you can, for example, turn a jelly mold into a pavilion model or put a chair on the back of a cutout to make it stand up," she explains. That it is possible to change anything from one state to another."

And, she says, this type of adjustment may stand in for – or be a part of – a broader power to effect change. "Not that it's easy; painting isn't simple; it's really rather challenging. It is, nevertheless, possible to alter something about yourself, your circumstances, or the world. "If she can do it, then it must be possible for me to do it, too," I want others to think.

Thanks to Charlotte Higgins at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.