Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry CBE
Born	(1960-03-24) 24 March 1960 Chelmsford, Essex, England
Education	Portsmouth Polytechnic
Known for	Fine art
Spouse	Philippa Perry
Awards	Turner Prize
Patron(s)	Charles Saatchi

Grayson Perry CBE RA (born 24 March 1960) is an English artist, known mainly for his ceramic vases and cross-dressing. Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance. There is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images of Perry as "Claire", his female alter-ego, often appear. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003.

In 2008 Perry was ranked number 32 in The Telegraph's list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". In 2012, Perry was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life.

Early and personal life

Grayson Perry was born in Chelmsford. When he was seven, his father left the family. Perry describes his father's departure as the event that had the largest impact on him in his life. He subsequently lived at Bicknacre, Essex, with his mother, his stepfather, a younger sister and two stepbrothers, and attended St. Mary's C of E Primary School, Woodham Ferrers Church of England School.

In his childhood Perry took an interest in drawing and building model aeroplanes, both of which were to become themes in his work. To escape from a difficult family situation and his stepfather's violence, he retreated to his bedroom or his stepfather's shed where he became absorbed in a fantasy life, sometimes involving a teddy bear (called Alan Measles) that had become a "surrogate father figure".

He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School. Perry took interest in conventional boys' activities, such as model aircraft, motorcycles and girls. He was in the school's Combined Cadet Corps and wanted to train as an army officer. In the late 1970s he was involved in the Chelmsford punk scene.

Cross-dressing

Perry describes his first sexual experience at the age of seven when he tied himself up in his pyjamas. From an early age he liked to dress in women's clothes and in his teens realized that he was a transvestite. At the age of 15 he moved in with his father's family in Chelmsford, where he began to go out dressed as a woman. When he was discovered by his father he said he would stop, but his stepmother told everyone about it and a few months later threw him out. He returned to his mother and stepfather at Great Bardfield.

At this time he decided not to join the army and, following the encouragement of his art teacher, decided to study art. He did an art foundation course at Braintree College of Further Education from 1978 to 1979. He studied for a BA in fine art at Portsmouth Polytechnic, graduating in 1982. He had an interest in film and exhibited his first piece of pottery at the "New Contemporaries" show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1980. In the months following his graduation he joined The Neo Naturists, a group started by Christine Binnie to revive the "true sixties spirit – which involves living one's life more or less naked and occasionally manifesting it into a performance for which the main theme is body paint". They put on events at galleries and other venues.

When he left for Portsmouth in 1979, his stepfather told him not to return home. Perry has been estranged from his mother since 1990. After graduating he lived a hand-to-mouth existence in squats, at one point sharing a house with milliner Stephen Jones and pop musician Boy George, the three of them competing to see who could wear the most outrageous outfits to Blitz, a New Romantic nightclub in Covent Garden, London.

Modern day

He lives in London with his wife, the author and psychotherapist Philippa Perry. They have one daughter, Florence, born in 1992. In 2015 he was appointed to succeed Kwame Kwei-Armah as chancellor of University of the Arts London.

Perry is also a keen mountain biker.

Politics

Perry is a supporter of the Labour Party, and has designed works of art to raise funds for the party.

Career

Perry started pottery lessons in September 1983 at the Central Institute where he was taught by Sarah Sanderson. His first exhibition of ceramics was in London in December 1983. He began to develop images and text that represented his experience in terms of "explicit scenes of sexual perversion – sadomasochism, bondage, transvestism". For a while he made glazed plates with text because he could not make anything else. He was never motivated by a desire to work in clay as such, rather he chose pottery because studio ceramics was in "thrall to a formal idea". Film having proved an inadequate medium for communicating his ideas about gender and society, Perry found in pottery an effective alternative because of "the ways artifice could be deployed to make the innocent or honest pot have a purpose and mean something".

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam mounted a solo exhibition of his work in 2002. It was partly for this work that he was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003, the first time it was given to a ceramic artist. He attended the award ceremony dressed as a girl, his alter-ego Claire, wearing a little girl party frock. Perry was accompanied by his family.

He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to contemporary art.

Textiles

From pots to textiles, Perry created the 15m x 3m Walthamstow Tapestry on show in the London Gallery in 2009. The vast tapestry bears hundreds of brand names surrounding large figures in the stages of life from birth to death.

Perry's 2012 documentary series All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, about class "taste" variables, was produced by Channel 4. Living among the "classes" in different towns, he explores both male and female culture in each "league" and what they buy, in three parts: "Working Class Taste," and "Middle Class Taste," and "Upper Class Taste." At the same time, he photographs, then illustrates his experiences and the people, transcribing them into large tapestries. The contents he says, were partly inspired by William Hogarth's series of small paintings "A Rake's Progress" depicting 18th century society at the time (1732–33).

Of the tapestries, Perry says,

The Vanity of Small Differences consists of six tapestries that tell the story of Tim Rakewell. Some of the characters, incidents and objects I have included I encountered whilst filming All in the Best Possible Taste. The tapestries tell a story of class mobility. I think nothing has such a strong influence on our aesthetic taste as the social class we grow up in.

The sketches were translated using Photoshop to design the finished images and the tapestries were woven on a computer controlled loom in Flanders. In 2009, Thames and Hudson published an anthology of his work by Jacky Klein.

Work

Perry's work refers to several ceramic traditions, including Greek pottery and folk art. He has said, "I like the whole iconography of pottery. It hasn't got any big pretensions to being great public works of art, and no matter how brash a statement I make, on a pot it will always have certain humility ... [F]or me the shape has to be classical invisible: then you've got a base that people can understand". His vessels are made by coiling, a traditional method. Most have a complex surface employing many techniques, including "glazing, incision, embossing, and the use of photographic transfers", which requires several firings. To some he adds sprigs, little relief sculptures stuck to the surface. The high degree of skill required by his ceramics and their complexity distances them from craft pottery. It has been said that these methods are not used for decorative effect but to give meaning. Perry challenges the idea, implicit in the craft tradition, that pottery is merely decorative or utilitarian and cannot express ideas.

In his work Perry reflects upon his upbringing as a boy, his stepfather's anger and the absence of proper guidance about male conduct. Perry's understanding of the roles in his family is portrayed in Using My Family, from 1998, where a teddy bear provides affection, and the contemporaneous The Guardians, which depicts his mother and stepfather.

Much of Perry's work contains sexually explicit content. Some of his sexual imagery has been described as "obscene sadomasochistic sex scenes". He also has a reputation for depicting child abuse and yet there are no works depicting sexual child abuse although We've Found the Body of your Child, 2000 hints at emotional child abuse and child neglect. In other work he juxtaposes decorative clichés like flowers with weapons and war. Perry combines various techniques as a "guerrilla tactic", using the approachable medium of pottery to provoke thought.

As well as ceramics, Perry has worked in printmaking, drawing, embroidery and other textile work, film and performance. He has written a graphic novel, Cycle of Violence.

Perry frequently appears in public dressed as a woman, and he has described his female alter-ego variously as "a 19th century reforming matriarch, a middle-England protester for No More Art, an aero-model-maker, or an Eastern European Freedom Fighter," and "a fortysomething woman living in a Barratt home, the kind of woman who eats ready meals and can just about sew on a button". In his work Perry includes pictures of himself in women's clothes: for example Mother of All Battles (1996) is a photograph of "Claire" holding a gun and wearing a dress, in ethnic eastern European style, embroidered with images of war, exhibited at his 2002 Stedelijk show. One critic has called Perry "The social critic from hell". In 2011 Perry curated the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum.

Julie's House

Julie's House.

In 2015 the external work was completed on a holiday home in Wrabness, Essex, created by Perry working with FAT Architecture. It overlooks the River Stour, after a commission from Living Architecture, the charity founded by the philosopher Alain de Botton, and is known as "Julie's House." The house encapsulates the story of Julie May Cope, a fictional Essex woman. Writing in The Guardian, Ellis Woodman said, "Sporting a livery of green and white ceramic tiles, telephone-box red joinery and a gold roof, it is not easy to miss. ... Decoration is everywhere: from the external tiles embossed with motifs referencing Julie's rock-chick youth to extravagant tapestries recording her life's full narrative. Perry has contributed ceramic sculptures, modelled on Irish Sheelanagigs, which celebrate her as a kind of latter-day earth mother while the delivery driver's moped has even been repurposed as a chandelier suspended above the double-height living room."

Media

In 2005, Perry featured in a documentary produced by Twofour for Channel 4, Why Men Wear Frocks, in which he examined transvestism and masculinity at the start of the 21st century. Perry talked about his own life as a transvestite and the effect it had on him and his family, frankly discussing its difficulties and pleasures. The documentary won a Royal Television Society award for best network production. An autobiographical account of his formative years, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (written by Wendy Jones), was published in 2006. He was an arts correspondent for The Times until October 2007.

His television and radio appearances include BBC's Question Time, Hard Talk, Desert Island Discs and Have I Got News for You. He has also been the subject of a South Bank Show in 2006 and the subject of an Imagine documentary broadcast on 1 November 2011. His three-part series for Channel 4, All In The Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, was broadcast in June 2012. In July 2013, the BBC announced that Perry was to present the 2013 Reith Lectures. In a series of talks titled Playing to the Gallery, Perry would consider the state of art in the 21st Century. The lectures were broadcast in October and November 2013 on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. In 2014 Perry presented a three-part documentary series for Channel 4, Who Are You?. In 2016, Perry presented a series exploring masculinity for Channel 4, All Man.

References

• Buck, Louisa. The Personal Political Pots of Grayson Perry

External links

• Profile on Royal Academy of Arts Collections
• Video: Grayson Perry on Taste by Laura Bushell for i-D Magazine
• Images and Essay on the Walthamstow Tapestry
• Video interview with Grayson Perry at the Victoria Miro Gallery on www.theartnewspaper.tv
• Victoria Miro Gallery
• Photos of Grayson Perry work
• Saatchi Gallery
• BBC Collective
• "Map of an Englishman"
• "Exquisite Corpse"
• "Image from artist Chris Dooks of Perry in 2011 Brick Lane"
• Artist Grayson Perry (video)