Grayson Perry

Born in Chelmsford, Essex, in 1960, Grayson Perry is a highly acclaimed artist known for his insights and commentary on British society. When Perry first attended art school in the late 1970s, pottery was considered an unfashionable medium; he received no formal training and instead opted for night classes. A turning point in his career came in 2003 when he won the esteemed Turner Prize. On stage, dressed as his alter-ego, Claire, he accepted the prize with the glib riposte: ‘It’s about time a transvestite potter won the Turner.’[1]

While ceramics is the backbone of Perry’s artistic career, he has worked laterally across print-making and drawing, photography, iron and bronze casting, sculpture, textiles and tapestry. He has also produced a suite of television documentaries on the curiosities of class, culture, aesthetics and taste in contemporary British life. Perry’s foray into textiles began in 2008, with Alan Measles for God. The wool tapestry features Perry’s distinct cartoonish style of drawing, already well-honed through the sgraffito techniques of his vessels – an aesthetic often at odds with Perry’s acerbic social observations. In the same year, Perry worked on a large scale preliminary drawing for The Walthamstow Tapestry (2009) . The monumental, fifteen-metre-long tapestry chronicles a life from birth to death through a stream of corporate brand names stripped of their logos (like Coca-Cola to Louis Vuitton). It was aesthetically inspired by the medieval Bayeux Tapestry and early twentieth century Indonesian batiks. As Perry self-proclaims, “I am a car crash of influences.”[2]

The Walthamstow Tapestry references a borough of Greater London where Perry has his studio. Walthamstow also happens to be the birthplace of William Morris, who ‘liked a bit of tapestry’.[3] Morris was a leading proponent of Britain’s nineteenth century arts and crafts movement, famous for his wallpapers, furniture and furnishing textiles, and staunch rejection of industrialisation. The ‘Seaweed’ wallpaper (1901), designed by John Henry Dearle for William Morris & Co, is one of four iconic images of “Britishness” appropriated by Perry to produce Morris, Gainsborough, Turner, Riley (2021). Woven in CYMK (Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black) on a large digital loom, the image of Morris’ wallpaper is amalgamated with three others: Bridget Riley’s High Sky (1991), an emblem of Riley’s famous Op Art painting style; JWM Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (1838), an icon of Britain’s industrial revolution and voted the nation’s favourite painting in 2005; and Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (c. 1750), a portrait of the wealthy middle class in eighteenth century Britain.

Perry’s literal interweaving of these four images is an act of both love and iconoclasm. “I see my art in partnership between two parts of my personality…the hobbit and the punk. I always try to balance my love of intricate historical detail (the hobbit) with social comment on my own time (the punk).”[4] Morris, Gainsborough, Turner, Riley speaks to Perry’s fascination with all things British, and the broader tensions and forces that shape the people’s psyche:

Each image perhaps stands for a formative thread in our nation’s culture, the rise of new money from trade, the industrial revolution, new technology, the rise of socialism and popular cultural upheaval. They also stand for different aspects of our character, nostalgia for past wars and cosy hearths, a love of our countryside and occasional bouts of creative freshness.[5]