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But we all get older. One of the problems for the YBAs is that youth and a "don´t give a toss" attitude was the hallmark of their work. Novelty mattered more than experience or anything so déclassé as wisdom. Celebrity was the buzz word. So how do you react to the world when the waist thickens and the long nights out getting smashed are a thing of the past because you have to get home for the baby sitter?

Now 44 Hume has remained hugely ambitious. His new works, seven marble tableaux, are made from a variety of different polished marble sections collaged together with lead tracery reminiscent of that found in stain glass windows or pietra dura (an antique technique for making designs with semi-precious stones.) With their opulent surfaces and their references to the Madonna and Child they recall the floors of Baroque palaces and Renaissance cathedrals. Since antiquity marble has adorned civic buildings and these works seem to have their eye on the corporate board room or the lavish loft space of some new young entrepreneurial collector.

It all began when Hume was asked by a friend to make something for his bathroom and after a walk through the graveyard of Bunhill Fields in the city of London had the idea of working in stone. Employing a technique traditionally used to carve epitaphs into gravestones he has continued his engagement with the figure and drawing using lead in much the same way that his etched lines delineated the polished areas of colour in his high gloss aluminium paintings. His drawings are complex and multi-layered, accomplished and decorative. The images used are largely culled from parenting magazines and explore his complex feelings about mothering, pathos and love. And yet with their cold hard surfaces and their use of poisonous lead they seem to me, more than anything, to be about death.

Upstairs a series of dark canvases combine chalk, charcoal and flat pools of oil paint. With their titles such as Bacchus and Cassandra these dense black drawings of figures and cornucopia, like the carvings on the leg of a Victorian side board, speak of a brooding sense of loss and decay. For there is something decadent about Hume´s work. Decadence as an aesthetic movement has always been associated with moral "decline" and explored the dark side of human nature; the erotic, the perverse and death as in Baudelaire´s Les Fleurs du Mal. At the end of the 19th century cleverness, wit and sophisticated knowingness stood for many poets and artists in contrast to the mundanity of naturalism. With their richly shimmering surfaces and archaic subjects Hume´s work seems to nod in the direction of this sensuous Symbolism and the jewel-like paintings of Gustave Moreau or Aubrey Beardsley´s illustrations for The Yellow Book.

This body of work represents a new departure for Hume. Ambitious and arresting with their black granite, ox-blood red marbles and grey-green slates his stone pieces feel like the sort of panels that might have once decorated the loggias of Nero´s villa at the end of the Roman Empire when that society had lost all moral authority and was in terminal decline. A bit like our own times, perhaps?

Sue Hubbard is a poet, novelist and art critic for The Independent where this article was originally published.

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