october-2011

once sat on your grandma’s sideboard refl ecting
idealised scenes of pastoral life. Perry brings to
his pottery grim scenes of life on sink estates or
modern icons such as mobile phones, hoodies,
baseball hats and trainers.
It’s a kind of double-take experience: you think you’re
looking at a quaint version of a Japanese Edo jar rendered in
rose pink and gold stencilling, only to realise it’s a scene
depicting Perry dressed as Claire brandishing a doll, chasing
a skinhead. The kind of piece which art historian Jacky Klein
describes as “an uncomfortable clash of form and content”. He
actually named a piece of work I Saw This Vase And Thought It
Beautiful, Then I Looked At It, a comment made by an aunt.
Perry was born in 1960 in Chelmsford, Essex, growing up
unhappily with his mother and stepfather aft er his own father
left the family home following his mother’s aff air. Feeling this
loss keenly, the young Grayson began to create a vivid
imaginary world around his teddy bear character, Alan Measles.
“He became my transition object onto which I projected all my
feelings and he fi gured in all my childhood games. It wasn’t till
I went into therapy that I realised how powerful he was as an
object and that he was a carrier for a lot of my personality,”
he says. These days Alan Measles has his own blog.
Perry fi rst put on a dress around the age of 12 or 13, and found
it helped him process feelings he couldn’t fully make sense of.
“Transvestism wouldn’t exist if children were brought up exactly
the same. It wouldn’t be a reaction against the stereotyping that
goes on. Perhaps it’s a crude way of accessing the emotions of
the opposite gender, but you don’t become a transvestite as an
adult, you decide when you’re a child, very early on.”
It’s not hard to see how his past – splintered relationships,
parental absences, a histrionic mother and a violent,
disapproving stepfather – has fed a preoccupation in his work
with what he has termed “fairytales of dysfunction”.
But at the same time Perry believes the dysfunctional
British family is a fairly normal state for many of us.
In the 1980s he hung out on the periphery of
a cool group of musicians and artists that included
Boy George, Leigh Bowery and Derek Jarman, but
demonstrated his resistance to the whole idea of cool
by embracing a hippy set of friends. This included
a couple of Scottish sisters who enjoyed naturism
and performance art, and dragged young Perry along
“to make up the numbers”.
“They made me see that you had to consciously step outside
of things to make it more interesting. Cool is when creativity
becomes rules and people become like sheep. Irony has gone
so downmarket now.”
College took him to Portsmouth in the early 1980s and later
an artists’ squat in Camden, north London, where he made
fi lms, experimented with drugs (“the opposite of creative”), and
attended free pottery classes that appealed on account of their
unfashionable image. “I realised there was a lot of negativity
around pottery that I could exploit,” he explains. “That it
possessed the kind of values the art world really worries
about: twee, decorative, suburban, sentimental. It considers
them insults, so I’m drawn to them for that reason.”
62 metropolitan
The
Walthamstow
Tapestry,
2009
Talking to Grayson Perry is like watching a one-man show
– he holds court, riffi ng, ranting and rat-a-tat-tatting ideas,
opinions and theories. A rich, dirty, infectious laugh frequently
explodes in loud guff aws. He’s entertaining, contrary, dry and
he doesn’t care if people like him or get him. “I’ve dined out
on the fact that people didn’t take pottery seriously. And now
lots of potters say to me, ‘Does this mean the art world is more
accepting of ceramics?’ and I say, ‘No, it means the art world is
more accepting of me!’” He likes motorbikes (he rides a Harley)
and has created a special blue-and-pink one for the exhibition,
“I do quite like to poke a
stick at the art world, see
what its weak points are”
is very fond of headscarves (“Most trannies are drawn to dress
like their mothers, so the headscarf is a very loaded object”),
and is happy to be considered a national treasure.
His forthcoming exhibition, The Tomb of the Unknown
Craft sman which opens this month at the British Museum,
has been two-and-a-half years in the making and was his idea.
“I wanted to put on a show where people come primed to see
history and culture as a kind of anthropological thing rather
than this contemporary thing that is somehow diffi cult and
morally superior. The people who made these objects would
not have regarded themselves in an narcissistic, ego-driven
way like a lot of artists do,” he explains.
“The idea of calling them artists in the modern way seemed
a bit wrong,” he says. “The name of the exhibition has more
resonance and is slightly more mischievous as an idea for
an artist like me. I never wanted to be the poster boy for
Photography: Linda Nylind/Guardian News & Media; Getty