Provincial Punk explored Perry’s uniquely subversive practice, from a young artist forging his own artistic language in 1980’s Britain to his status today as one of the most prominent and incisive commentators on contemporary society and culture.
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Described as ‘a great chronicler of contemporary life’, Grayson Perry is well known for his beautifully crafted artworks that combine autobiographical reference with wry social commentary on themes ranging from class, taste, consumerism and war, to art versus craft.
I was a punk in the provincial sense. I was there in my bedroom with an old school shirt stencilling the word 'hate' onto it whilst looking out onto the lush turf of the north Essex countryside. Then, when I first came to London I was hanging out with people who were at the cutting edge of fashion and culture and yet I was doing pottery with a Shetland wooly jumper view of the world.
Perry’s in-depth engagement with mark-making, craft and technique, and his testing of the boundaries between art and craft was an important theme in Provincial Punk, explored through his ceramics, drawings, films, tapestries and prints. Central to the exhibition was an extensive display of Perry’s ceramic pots, including some of his earliest works from the late 1980s through to the present day. Perry’s hand-made, richly glazed pots are visually seductive, covered in drawings, handwritten texts and collaged elements. Consciously seeking to subvert ceramics’ apparent second-class status as ‘craft’ within the world of fine art, their traditional, decorative form belies their content, touching on themes such as religion, childhood trauma and environmental disaster.
Perry’s interest in the decorative is intentionally at odds with the studio-pottery movement dominant in Britain since the 1920s, which advocated function and simplicity of form. Perry makes his pots using a hand building technique, constructing them gradually with long, thin, coiled lengths of clay.
His influences are wide ranging, including nineteenth century Satsuma pottery, Japanese Mingei, American folk pottery and in particular seventeenth century English slipware. This type of pottery involves applying slip – liquid clay in water – to the pot’s surface to create different decorative effects. Perry uses inlaying and trailing, sprig moulding, stamping and photographic transfers to decorate his pots. Using a technique called sgraffito, his intricate drawings are scored into the clay when it is leather-hard. Once fired in the kiln, the incisions are filled in with coloured oxides.
Perry places himself subversively within the tradition of pottery with his own maker’s mark, to which he added a crown after winning the Turner Prize in 2003.
About the Artist
British artist Grayson Perry (born 1960, Chelmsford) started making ceramics at a pottery evening class in 1983. The power of ceramics for Perry was its twee and 'second-class' status as craft in the world of contemporary art. He describes his pots as 'stealth bombs'; their traditional form and highly decorative surfaces intentionally clash with their subversive, humorous and emotionally frank content.
While walking a playful line between the worlds of art and craft, Perry has become extremely knowledgeable about the history and language of ceramics. Drawing inspiration from English seventeenth-century slipware, to folk pottery from around the world.
The collage techniques and surreal, imaginary landscapes that cover his pots echo his early sketchbooks which he would work on for hours while starting to experiment with ceramics.
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