Grayson Perry

Perry’s urns are rendered with an incomprehensible master-craft: their surfaces richly textured from designs marked into the clay, followed by intricately complicated glazing and photo-transfer techniques. Perry makes ceramic pots, hand-stitched quilts, and outrageous dress designs, creating a cosmopolitan folk-art.

His form and content is always incongruous: classic Greecian-like urns bearing friezes of car-wrecks, cell-phones, supermodels, as well as more dark and literary scenes often incorporating auto-biographical references.

Unhappy expressions on the little girls’ faces in Golden Ghosts contrast sharply with the idyllic country cottages stenciled in the background. Perry often uses found images to create a mood or a tension – the exceptionally sad image of the seated girl is that of a child affected by the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station disaster. This evocative work hints at a familiarity with psychotherapy, made at a time when Perry was coming to terms with his own unhappy past. Perry’s transvestite alter ego, Claire, appears outlined in gold as the ghost in the title, dressed in the elaborate embroidered Coming Out Dress, made for a performance in 2000.

Perry reveals ‘One of the reasons I dress up as a woman is my low self-esteem, to go with the image of women being seen as second class…It is like pottery: that’s seen as a second-class thing too’.

People say, ‘why do you need to put sex, violence or politics or some kind of social commentary into my work?’ Without it, it would be pottery. I think that crude melding of those two parts is what makes my work.”

This has the preciousness of a well-travelled Russian antique. Glazed in golds, silvers and whites, Perry’s urn tells a Gothic tale of a child’s death in a gloomy small town. The image is timeless: it could be yesterday or eighty years ago; but almost certainly it has to be Eastern European – nowhere else could such horrific grief be met with such fairy-tale romanticism.

Winner of the 2003 Turner Prize, British artist Grayson Perry creates seductively beautiful pots that convey challenging themes; at the heart of his practice is a passionate desire to comment on deep flaws within society. Perry uses pots as narrative and figurative media, a round, curved surface for a bizarre or bitter story.

Perry’s urns are rendered with an incomprehensible master-craft: their surfaces richly textured from designs marked into the clay, followed by intricately complicated glazing and photo-transfer techniques.

These highly decorative objects, often covered with layers of lustre, gold leaf and sugary kitsch transfers are, by the artist´s own admission, ´perversion to match the curtains´.

A master of the incongruous juxtaposition, Grayson Perry scrawls savage satirical messages alongside sentiments of nostalgia for lost innocence.

Grayson Perry often uses found images to create a mood or a tension