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Guerrilla Tactics And Greek Pottery

‘From my childhood I developed guerrilla tactics; there was no sense in confronting the enemy head on,’ Perry says of his relationship with his stepfather. His breakout 2002 show at the Barbican Centre was called Guerrilla Tactics and depicted scenes of violence, sex, war and childhood trauma, on ceramic works hinting at the craft’s ancient Greek origins.

Humiliation And Huhne

A vivisectionist of masculine myths, Perry has written in The Descent Of Man of the need for men to become more comfortable with failure and embarrassment; humiliation even. Humiliation (though not his) came in 2014 when, for a TV show exploring identity, Perry made a pot which depicted disgraced MP Chris Huhne, whom he described as ‘Default Man’. The piece featured repeat patterns of the politician’s face, his personalised number plate and penises.

Iconography

Perry’s practice revives the archetype or icon as a subject for art and literature. Figures, objects and places stand not for themselves but for some essential quality or absolute truth about life. In the artist’s hands, these have less to do with religious dogma than personality-shaping events in childhood: garden sheds, crashed cars, pylons, pillboxes, and girls with dolls all pop up everywhere.

Jonathan Jones

Art critic and professional vibe-killer Jonathan Jones hates Grayson Perry’s work. He once called it, ‘what happens when art becomes a pseudo-intellectual entertainment for a world that is too busy to look at, too distracted to feel.’ Jones’ paraphrased criticism of Perry’s work as ‘suburban popular culture’ turned up on a pot in Perry’s 2017 Serpentine exhibition, with the reviewer’s name spelt wrongly. Burn.

KING EDWARD VI GRAMMAR SCHOOL, CHELMSFORD

Definitely not included in this list because its author studied there, KEGS regularly appears on lists of top state schools in the country and has been carting off maladjusted young men to Oxbridge for centuries. When Perry went there, he had a satchel rather than the de rigeur Adidas sports bag. He was bullied. Plus ça change.

Lepers And London

There was a functioning leper hospital until the 1970s near one of Perry’s childhood homes, in the semi-rural Tory-ish village of Bicknacre. No joke. Art was the young man’s ‘ticket out of Essex’ and into a world of squats, drugs and nudity in the capital, via art college in Portsmouth.

Mothers And Men

Perry credits his outspoken working-class mum for ‘a lot of my rebelliousness, the style of it’. Maternal themes recur throughout his work, including ‘The Mother Of All Battles’ (1996), a famous photograph of Claire as an Eastern European peasant girl wielding an enormous gun. But young Perry was a boys’ boy, too, obsessed with military vehicles and aircraft. In his book, The Descent Of Man, he skewers the compulsions placed on men to be silent, violent and dully dressed.

NEO-NATURISTS

The first avant-garde group to which Perry attached himself was spearheaded by his friends at art college in Portsmouth. Surrounded by the artifice and glamour of 80s culture, they staged naked sitins at art galleries, painted on each other’s bodies, and generally indulged in whimsical enactments of earthy, hippy soulfulness.

Outsider Art

With its busy compositions, nods to folk craft and (only apparent) lack of concern for institutional approval, Perry’s art owes a debt to the tradition variously dubbed art brut or outsider art. This work is created outside the canon, often without formal training, sometimes by people confined in mental asylums. The artist was astounded by an outsider art show at London’s Hayward Gallery early in his career.

Pottery And Punk

As a young artist, Perry recalls, he took up pottery as ‘a funny dalliance . . . a tease . . . pottery was a joke . . . I was attracted to pottery because it was naff.’ Coming of age in a provincial town in the late 1970s, he was an adolescent pogo-er too, and brought something of the iconoclastic spirit of punk to his new craft, rarely making prototypes and often cracking things in the kiln. Honourable P mentions for Portsmouth, psychotherapy and his partner, therapist Philippa Perry.

QUICK, CATCH THE MOTH!

‘We had two teachers in my first primary school,’ Perry’s autobiography recalls. ‘One was called Mrs Quick, the other Mrs Moth. “Quick! Catch the Moth!” was our joke.’ He was on QI once, too (look, Q is hard).

Reith Lectures

Perry gave the 2013 BBC Reith Lectures. In a series of talks titled Playing To The Gallery, he considered the state of 21st-century art, exploring some of the pretensions and confusions responsible for its mixed reception.

Sgt Pepper

When pop artist Peter Blake remade his famous photo-collage from The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’ s record cover in 2012, Perry was among the icons of contemporary British culture to appear.

Television

Perry is now arguably better known for his TV work than for his art. His credits include Why Men Wear Frocks (2005), Grayson Perry: All Man (2016), and Grayson’s Art Club, aired during the lockdowns of 2020–22. Perry often creates artworks as part of the onscreen narrative for his shows.

Urban Foxes

‘I can remember the first time I saw an urban fox,’ Perry recently recalled. ‘I was so thrilled to see this piece of wildness wandering across the road nonchalantly.’ In the lockdown years, he made a series of drawings, paintings and collages called Urban Fox based on nocturnal encounters near his London home.

Vivian Girls

Perry is an inveterate fan of outsider artist Henry Darger, a hospital janitor from Chicago who lived a solitary life and spent his evenings writing and illustrating an extraordinary fantasy opus that was only discovered after his death. It was called The Story Of The Vivian Girls, In What Is Known As The Realms Of The Unreal, Of The Glendeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused By The Child Slave Rebellion. Perry paid homage to Darger with his 2000 vase ‘The Revenge Of The Alison Girls’, misremembering the little heroines’ names.

WE'VE FOUND THE BODY OF YOUR CHILD

In this disquieting piece from 2000, Perry confronts the theme of child neglect more directly than elsewhere. A woman looks at her dead child, surrounded by figures who may be comforting or confronting her. The glazed earthenware is littered with phrases such as ‘never have kids’ (a refrain of Perry’s mother), which the artist calls ‘the thin end of the wedge of child abuse’.

Xcrucifi X Ion And Kinky Se X

Stretching the alphabetical format with this entry: Perry’s first ever ceramic plate, ‘Kinky Sex’ (1983), shows Christ on the cross with a coin over his penis. ‘It appeared as if he had had an enormous wet dream while being crucified.’ Charming.

YOUNG GIRL (PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS)

In his 2006 autobiography, based on recorded interviews with his friend Wendy Jones, Perry transports readers from the estates and caravan parks of his youth, to art college and the glazing of his first plate; which, as we now know, showed Jesus with a penny on his cock.

Zturner Pri Z E

Perry won the prestigious award (it contains a Z, so sue me) in 2003, beating off competition from favourites the Chapman Brothers. It secured the legend of Grayson Perry as artist and provocateur.

Grayson Perry: Smash Hits, National Galleries Of Scotland: National, 22 July–12 November.

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