Grayson Perry
Encyclopedia
Grayson Perry 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.
. When he was seven, his father left the family because of his mother's adultery. 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 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 father’s shed where he became absorbed in a fantasy life, sometimes involving a teddy bear
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 airplanes, motorcycles and girls. He was in the school's Combined Cadet Corps and wanted to train as an army officer. He was involved in the Chelmsford punk
scene in the late 1970s.
At the same time he had unconventional sexual desires and fantasies. He 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 at Chelmsford, where he began to go out dressed as a woman. When he was discovered by his stepfather he said he would stop, but his mother 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”. (Dawson, p. 81) They put on events at galleries and other venues.
When he went to 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.
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.
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 (co-written with Wendy Jones), was published in 2006. He was an arts correspondent for The Times
until October 2007 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sitesearch.do?query=grayson+perry&hitsperpage=10&nextOffset=0&offset=0&leftStartIndex=1&leftEndIndex=10&submitStatus=searchFormSubmitted&mode=simple§ionId=674.
He lives in London with his wife, the author and psychotherapist, Philippa Perry
and they have one daughter, Flo who was born in 1992.
In 2007, Perry made the following comments on self-censorship in The Times
: “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat” (Jihadist violence cows "fearless" artists into silence), a reference to Theo van Gogh
.
In 2009, Thames and Hudson published an anthology of his work by Jacky Klein.
. 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,1998, where a teddy bear provides affection, and The Guardians,1998, 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 Grayson Perry curated the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum
http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/grayson_perry.aspx.
His television appearances include BBC's Question Time
, Desert Island Discs
and Have I Got News for You
. He has also been the subject of a South Bank Show in 2006 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1030613/ and was the subject of a Imagine
documentary broadcast on 1 November 2011.
Education
Grayson Perry was born in ChelmsfordChelmsford
Chelmsford is the county town of Essex, England and the principal settlement of the borough of Chelmsford. It is located in the London commuter belt, approximately northeast of Charing Cross, London, and approximately the same distance from the once provincial Roman capital at Colchester...
. When he was seven, his father left the family because of his mother's adultery. Perry describes his father's departure as the event that had the largest impact on him in his life. He subsequently lived at Bicknacre
Bicknacre
Bicknacre is a village in Essex, England. It is approximately north of South Woodham Ferrers and southeast of the county town of Chelmsford. The village is in the borough of Chelmsford and in the parliamentary constituency of Maldon & East Chelmsford...
, Essex, with his mother, his stepfather, a younger sister and two stepbrothers, and attended Woodham Ferrers
Woodham Ferrers
Woodham Ferrers is a small village about southeast of Chelmsford, located between South Woodham Ferrers and Bicknacre in the county of Essex, England. The village is often shortened to Woodham by those in the area...
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 father’s shed where he became absorbed in a fantasy life, sometimes involving a teddy bear
Teddy bear
The teddy bear is a stuffed toy bear. They are usually stuffed with soft, white cotton and have smooth and soft fur. It is an enduring form of a stuffed animal in many countries, often serving the purpose of entertaining children. In recent times, some teddy bears have become collector's items...
that had become a “surrogate father figure”.
He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School
King Edward VI Grammar School (Chelmsford)
King Edward VI Grammar School, or KEGS, is a British grammar school located in the town of Chelmsford, Essex, England. It takes pupils between the ages of 11 and 18 — from Year 7 to 11 the pupils are exclusively male, although it becomes mixed in the sixth form .The present headteacher is Thomas...
. Perry took interest in conventional boys' activities, such as model airplanes, motorcycles and girls. He was in the school's Combined Cadet Corps and wanted to train as an army officer. He was involved in the Chelmsford punk
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
scene in the late 1970s.
At the same time he had unconventional sexual desires and fantasies. He 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 at Chelmsford, where he began to go out dressed as a woman. When he was discovered by his stepfather he said he would stop, but his mother told everyone about it and a few months later threw him out. He returned to his mother and stepfather at Great Bardfield
Great Bardfield
Great Bardfield is a large village in Essex, England.The Great Lodge at Bardfield is a Grade II listed building, which built in the 16th century and was given to Anne of Cleves by Henry VIII as one of several properties as part of a generous settlement for an amicable divorce. The grounds include...
.
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
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
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
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
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”. (Dawson, p. 81) They put on events at galleries and other venues.
When he went to 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
Stephen Jones (milliner)
Stephen Jones OBE is a leading British milliner based in London, who is considered one of the world's most radical and important milliners of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He is also one of the most prolific, having created hats for the catwalk shows of many leading couturiers and...
and pop musician Boy George
Boy George
Boy George is a British singer-songwriter who was part of the English New Romantic movement which emerged in the early 1980s. He helped give androgyny an international stage with the success of Culture Club during the 1980s. His music is often classified as blue-eyed soul, which is influenced by...
, the three of them competing to see who could wear the most outrageous outfits to Blitz, a New Romantic
New Romantic
New Romanticism , was a pop culture movement in the United Kingdom that began around 1979 and peaked around 1981. Developing in London nightclubs such as Billy's and The Blitz and spreading to other major cities in the UK, it was based around flamboyant, eccentric fashion and new wave music...
nightclub in Covent Garden, London.
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
Stedelijk Museum
Founded in 1874, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for classic modern and contemporary art in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It has been housed on the Paulus Potterstraat, next to Museum Square Museumplein and to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam Zuid...
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.
In 2005, Perry featured in a documentary produced by Twofour
Twofour
Twofour is a UK independent media group that was founded in 1988 by Charles Wace, a former TV news producer and brother of financier Ian Wace. It has grown to become one of the largest independent media groups in the UK, employing over 350 people internationally....
for Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
, 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
Royal Television Society
The Royal Television Society is a British-based educational charity for the discussion, and analysis of television in all its forms, past, present and future. It is the oldest television society in the world...
award for best network production.
An autobiographical account of his formative years, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (co-written with Wendy Jones), was published in 2006. He was an arts correspondent for The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
until October 2007 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sitesearch.do?query=grayson+perry&hitsperpage=10&nextOffset=0&offset=0&leftStartIndex=1&leftEndIndex=10&submitStatus=searchFormSubmitted&mode=simple§ionId=674.
He lives in London with his wife, the author and psychotherapist, Philippa Perry
Philippa Perry
Philippa Perry , psychotherapist, is the author of the graphic novel, Couch Fiction; a graphic tale of psychotherapy, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010...
and they have one daughter, Flo who was born in 1992.
In 2007, Perry made the following comments on self-censorship in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
: “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat” (Jihadist violence cows "fearless" artists into silence), a reference to Theo van Gogh
Theo van Gogh (film director)
Theodoor "Theo" van Gogh was a Dutch film director, film producer, columnist, author and actor.Van Gogh worked with the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali to produce the film Submission, which criticized the treatment of women in Islam and aroused controversy among Muslims...
.
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 artFolk art
Folk art encompasses art produced from an indigenous culture or by peasants or other laboring tradespeople. In contrast to fine art, folk art is primarily utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic....
. He has said, “I like the whole iconography
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
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,1998, where a teddy bear provides affection, and The Guardians,1998, 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
Child abuse
Child abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...
and child neglect
Child neglect
Child neglect is defined as:# "the failure of a person responsible for a child’s care and upbringing to safeguard the child’s emotional and physical health and general well-being"...
. 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
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
, 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
Barratt Developments
Barratt Developments PLC is one of the largest residential property development companies in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1958 as Greensitt Bros. but control was later assumed by Sir Lawrie Barratt. It was originally based in Newcastle upon Tyne but is now located at David Wilson's former...
, 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 Grayson Perry curated the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/grayson_perry.aspx.
His television appearances include BBC's Question Time
Question Time (TV series)
Question Time is a topical debate BBC television programme in the United Kingdom, based on Any Questions?. The show typically features politicians from at least the three major political parties as well as other public figures who answer questions put to them by the audience...
, Desert Island Discs
Desert Island Discs
Desert Island Discs is a BBC Radio 4 programme first broadcast on 29 January 1942. It is the second longest-running radio programme , and is the longest-running factual programme in the history of radio...
and Have I Got News for You
Have I Got News for You
Have I Got News for You is a British television panel show produced by Hat Trick Productions for the BBC. It is based loosely on the BBC Radio 4 show The News Quiz, and has been broadcast since 1990, currently the BBC's longest-ever running television panel show...
. He has also been the subject of a South Bank Show in 2006 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1030613/ and was the subject of a Imagine
Imagine (TV series)
Imagine is a wide ranging arts series first broadcast on BBC One in 2003, hosted and executive produced by Alan Yentob. Each series usually consists of 4 to 7 episodes, each on a different topic...
documentary broadcast on 1 November 2011.