The Grapevine: "In life, as in art, I have been dusted with the perversion brush." GP

Grayson Perry

Last year I was fortunate enough to listen to a talk by Grayson Perry (1960-) entitled “I Believe in Art”, as well as picking up a signed copy of Jacky Klein’s book on him. As I was walking through Tottenham Court Road tube station I came across a poster advertising Grayson Perry’s exhibition at the British Museum. This impelled me to read the book before I go to the exhibition and jog my memory of talk I heard, which was so inspiring at the time.

Grayson Perry rose to fame winning the Turner Prize in 2003. The BBC news article headline simply stated “Transvestite potter wins Turner”. He is a contemporary of the YBA’s (Young British Artists) alongside the likes of Sam Taylor-Wood and Damien Hirst. He has had patronage from major art collectors including Charles Saatchi.

Grayson Perry (as Claire)

The two aspects that make Perry stand out within the art world are that he is a potter and a transvestite. Pottery has unfashionable associations with “decoration, domesticity and craft”. Perry being brought up in a working-class family from Chelmsford, Essex liked the appeal of ceramics as having a “presumed second-class status”. One could say both these aspects play on contradictions, with pottery it is the uncomfortable border between art and craft and the same with transvestism of male and female and also serious and comical.

Grayson Perry

Perry as 'Claire'

The subjects Perry plays around with are topical and contemporary such as consumer culture, “kinky sex”, teenage crime and the ‘war on terror’. These inspire unexpected or explicit imagery of maimed children, aborted foetuses, swastikas and sadomasochistic porn.

Moonlight Wankers (2001)
Grayson Perry - "This is a piece about masturbation...'Wanker' is normally an insult, and yet most people masturbate. Relax and it can be quite a thrilling and romantic thing. So this pot presents an arcadian vision with people masturbating all over it against the backdrop of a cliched rural sunset."

This dress is part of Perry's embroidery, its called "Claire as the mother of all battles" (1996)

This is a detail from the same dress in which Perry has distorted the human body into a swastika.

His inspiration is drawn from a wide variety of sources such as the bawdy humour of 18^th and 19^th century caricaturists William Hogarth and George Cruikshank, the literary wit of Aubrey Beardsley combined with predominantly German Expressionism in Berlin in the 1920’s. In Klein’s words, he is “as likely to take inspiration from a Chinese vase or Gothic altarpiece as he is from the menus of local fast-food restaurants or junk mail catalogues pushed through the letterbox.”

Lysistrata shielding her coynte (1896), Aubrey Beardsley

An Oik's Progress (2004) - see transfers on adverts cut out from newspaper of new electrical appliances

Baba Yaga's hut (1983)

"This piece was made after I'd finished college and moved to London. I went through what I called my 'Bilbo Baggins' period..I think because I took acid too much. Baba Yaga's Hut was the zenith of this in some ways. I made it almost entirely from things I found lying around our squat in Camden town."

Baba Yaga is a Russian witch who eats children and lives in a hut standing on chicken legs.

Vote Alan Measles for God (2007)

"I wanted it to look a bit like a Third World political banner"

"Ive never seen myself as a potter or as part of the crafts movement. I am a conceptual artist masquerading as a craftsman"

Damien Hirst "If he wasn't an artist, he would be a serial killer."

Perry's personally designed motorbike with the shrine to Alan Measles (his teddy bear and the god of his imaginary world in the box on the back on the bike)