GRAYSON PER

Alan Measles

Grayson Perry has owned his world-renowned teddy bear since he was nine months old. Named after a neighbour’s son and memories of an early bout of measles, Alan became a fantasy guardian, a ‘benign dictator of my made-up land’, says Perry, during a turbulent and affection-starved adolescence. Since the mid-noughties, the foam-stuffed totem has popped up in dozens of artworks.

BIKES

Perry loves motorbikes. He once drove across Germany in a custom-made, powder-pink and baby-blue HarleyDavidson, carrying his teddy in a glass shrine over the back wheel. He described the look of his vehicle as ‘Mexican Day Of The Dead meets Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’.

Claire

Girlish alter-ego Claire has been credited by her creator as ‘a 19th-century reforming matriarch, a middle-England protestor for No More Art, an aero-model-maker, or an Eastern European freedom fighter.’ Dressing in women’s clothes since his teens, Perry used to purloin petticoats, slips and nighties from house clearances his stepfather did on the side.

Dolls

Claire often steps out in garb reminiscent of an oversized female marionette or Little Bo Peep toy, sometimes carrying an extra dolly for good measure. The artist recalls cutting out pictures of dolls from his sister’s Bunty comics as a child and making new clothes for them.

Essex

The flat landscapes and stolid suburban culture of Perry’s home county permeate his creativity. See, for example, recent works such as 2017 tapestry ‘The Battle Of Britain’, with its drab yet comforting pylon-speckled flatlands; and ‘A House For Essex’, a functioning holiday apartment built over the River Stour, inspired by the life of a fictional Essex woman named Julie May Cope

Fathers

Perry’s left when he was a kid, after his mother took up with the local milkman, an alpha-male who by turns intimidated, abused and ignored him. He has described his dad leaving as ‘the event that has had the largest impact on me in my life’. Now he is a father himself to illustrator and author Florence.