Artist talks about frocks, pots and his latest project, a TV series exploring identity. Plus Grayson Perry’s subjects reveal what it was like being turned into art.
Grayson Perry is all manned up – bestubbled, brute of a laugh, verging on the laddish. On a wall in his spanking new north London studio, there is a comforting sight: a framed picture of Perry as Claire, his alter ego, clean-shaven, in a Little Bo Peep dress and matching bonnet. Phew! I thought I’d come to the wrong place.
The Turner prize-winning potter and tapestry-maker, curator, writer and presenter is working on the final stages of a new TV series on identity. It’s not a new subject for him, though: in one way or another, Perry has spent most of his life exploring the subject. He has chosen a number of people to sit for him, and is turning their portraits into a series of pots, tapestries, statues and maps. The idea is that they represent modern Britain, and most have undergone a radical change – so there is the jailbird politician (Chris Huhne), the Muslim convert, the transgender man, the fella who’s famous for being famous and, of course, Perry himself.
He is hush-hush about how the portraits will turn out, partly because he hasn’t finished them and partly because he wants to save the big reveal for TV and an accompanying exhibition. But he shows me his own self-portrait. It’s a beautiful piece of draughtsmanship, intricately drawn, like a psycho-geographer’s board game, and looks nothing like the man himself. Words and expressions squitter about at all angles, some seemingly random, some clearly personal, the conscious and subconscious making merry in a work he’s calling Map Of Days. The map starts with Sad Puberty, My Ultimate Dream, Lingering Doubt, before segueing into Casual Sexist, Internet Porn, Neophilia, Alpha Masculinity, Anecdotage. There are a few bluffs thrown in: is he a casual sexist? No, it was just something he heard on the radio.
What’s at the heart of his self-portrait? He directs me to the dead, empty centre. “If you look in the middle, there is no heart. There’s a tiny figure kicking a can along the road. It says, ‘A sense of self.’” He laughs. “It’s fairly bleak. There is no self.” Has he been surprised by anything the project showed him about himself? “Well, I’ve had a lot of therapy, so there are not many booby traps.” His wife, Philippa, is a psychotherapist. Has she ever analysed him? “No, of course not. You can’t get it from your wife,” he says, slightly impatiently.
There is a hint of self-mockery when Perry uses the word “identity”; he’d rather show himself and others in all their glorious contradictions than reduced to the literal. “It seems so amorphous, it’s like grabbing smoke. Different bits of us come out at different times.” And he is aware that it is his own multiple identities that give him currency as a public figure. “I tick so many boxes. That’s why I get a lot of gigs – because I can do the lectures, I can do the television thing, and I dress up, and by the way, I’m an artist as well.”
When Perry won the Turner prize in 2003, he was in his early 40s and had been working as an artist for a good two decades. He was reasonably well known in the art world, but pretty anonymous outside it. It was hard to say at the time what got the most attention: that a transvestite had won the Turner, or that a ceramicist had – who thought a contemporary artist would be feted for his pots?
In the early days, Perry was defiantly uncommercial, making sculptures and short films, often featuring himself as Claire, seen by few and bought by none. He was also involved with an avant-garde group, the Neo-Naturists (started by his then girlfriend, Jennifer Binnie), who would paint their bodies and exhibit themselves at nightclubs and galleries. (There is a striking image of a twentysomething Perry, body-painted to the nines, with a bell and bow dangling from his penis.)
Then he went to night school, started to make pots and discovered he was good at it. He was heralded as a great ironist: what could be more postmodern than taking a traditional, hidebound form and calling it modern art? “I had friends with a very particular sense of humour, and they’d say, ‘Grayson, you’re making pottery!’ And there were layers of horror, and then it was, ‘Aha, I see what you’re doing. Like, oh yeah, pottery!’ Pottery was what sandal-wearing, windchime-lovers did. Art is sensitive to areas of visual culture that haven’t yet been colonised by the art world, and perhaps what they sensed back then was, here was an area that hadn’t been fully explored.”
In another way, though, it made perfect sense: Claire, whom he has described as a cross between Camilla Parker Bowles and Katie Boyle, seemed just the type of woman who might produce pots at evening class. And Perry was, of course, subverting the form: however wholesome they looked, the pots illustrated scenes of child abduction, sadomasochism, masturbating teddies, sweet little girls with penises hanging from their dresses. Through his work, he explored the issues that had bewildered and fascinated him since childhood: who was he? Where did he belong?
He was born in Essex to working-class parents. He says his father, an engineer, was a weak and narrow-minded man. His mother suffered from mental illness, had a volcanic temper and was eternally disappointed. She was an aspirational woman (hence Grayson’s name, taken from a man she once met), who felt she had been destined for a bigger, better life. When Perry was four, she ran off with the milkman (this is why, he tells me, he has always hated cliches) and married him. His stepfather was violent and intolerant, a newsagent by day and an amateur wrestler by night. (He is no longer in touch with his mother.)
Like his mother, young Grayson was bright and mixed up. He wanted to be an officer in the armed forces and he also wanted to dress up in women’s clothes. He knew from the off that this was an unusual combination. At 10, he had not heard of transvestism and felt he must be a solitary freak. He asked his sister if he could borrow a dress and wore it in private. He didn’t talk about it with her or anybody else, but he knew he wasn’t gay and he knew he didn’t want to be a woman; he also knew it was part of his sexuality. He was outed only when his stepsister found his diary.
How did his family react? “Oooh, not well,” his voice rises to a squeak. “Classic horror, I think. I reacted badly to that as well. I was a big sulker. I closed down and told them I’d stopped. And I put a cap on it until I went to university.”
He recalls watching The Naked Civil Servant, Jack Gold’s classic film about Quentin Crisp, with his father. “They’d just found out about me being a tranny, and I think he was watching me watch it, to see if I was gay.” Did he assume he was? “Yes. In those days, if you dressed up in women’s clothes, people thought you were gay.” Did Perry put him right? “No, I was a pimply, incredibly nervous, anxious, shy 16-year-old. I’m not going to have an open, confident conversation about my sexuality with my father, whom I don’t really know that well.”
His lifelong exploration of identity has always been about more than the girl-boy thing, though. There was the working-class boy moving into a middle-class world and feeling alien to both (he once said he feels most relaxed with the aristocracy); the inhibited conservative who tells me that his wife would be shocked if he ever came downstairs without a shirt on; the man of the people who nurses an unbridled ambition (in Perry’s personal mythology and art, his teddy bear Alan Measles represents the omnipotent artist-God that he would partly like to be); the popular artist who turned his back on the avant garde. Nor is Claire a stable identity. She has evolved from Monsoon girl, to Little Bo Peep, to chic woman of the world – and now has a thing for clown outfits.
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