‘We all grow with the friendship of pots in our homes. A pot has no pretentions of becoming a great public work, we know where we stand with a plate or a vase. It is this comfort we feel with pots that inspires me. Pottery on the whole retains an innocence despite its ancient history, it is disarming though it is brought into existence through a fiery birth full of risks.

I chose pottery because of the place it occupies in all our lives and my style emanates from the prim housewife whom I worked alongside at evening classes. Pots suit the scale of my ideas, they inhabit an intimate intellectual space, there is no bombastic confrontation, one is charmed into picking up ideas from a pot.

My manufacture of pots can be at the same time genteel and crude, this persuades the viewer to adopt a frame of mind perhaps at odds with the subject matter. I strive for my own perfection but do not mind my works retaining a naivety and clumsiness. None of my techniques are particularly complicated, in fact I relish using methods taught to the newcomer at an evening class. (…)

People might find my pots aggressive, subversive or even shocking but I am very at home with these ideas, sometimes mildly bored. The characters and landscapes in my narratives have become for me a personal cliché. I present what I know best and search for a piquant abrasion between my subjects which will lend them a freshness for myself and help sell the pots. (…)

Despite nurturing any spark of eccentricity in my middleclass outlook, and no matter how advanced the awkwardness of a pot, its success can still sadly depend on its decorative qualities. I am seduced by these more than anyone having made them. So I court the ugly, the twee, and the suburban in the name of much maligned brother pot.’ 1

Grayson Perry received his first pottery lesson around the age of nine at Woodham Ferrers C of E Primary School in Chelmsford, Essex, where he was taught how to make a coil pot by the vicar’s wife, as he recalls, ‘I went through the motions in the pottery lesson; I don’t think I particularly liked it, nor did I see it as the significant experience that it was.’ 2 Although he later made a few ceramics on his Foundation Course in Art at the Braintree College of Further Education (aged 18), and during his BA in Fine Art at the Portsmouth Polytechnic, Perry claims that he didn’t actually learn ceramics until September 1983, when he began taking evening classes at the Central Institute:

‘This was the first time I had been exposed to proper lessons, pottery skills and traditional techniques like coiling, glazing, stenciling, all of which I now use. (…) I went to classes once a week to begin with but enjoyed it so much that I wanted to do more. First it was Thursdays, then Wednesdays as well and then I started going to the Friday daytime class because on Fridays there was no teacher so I could do my own work undisturbed. I only paid £1 per lesson because I was on the dole.’ 3

These classes had a profound impact on the direction of Perry’s work and he has continued to produce ceramics ever since. In 2003, he became the first ceramicist to win the Turner Prize, a groundbreaking moment largely responsible for the medium’s integration into the realm of contemporary art. Following the success of his first major solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2002, Perry’s ceramics propelled him onto a new global stage and, despite creating work in a wide variety of media, his pots remain the works for which he is best known.

Perry claims that he is not an innovator of ceramics per se, because he makes pots based on classical forms, using traditional techniques, so as to create an ‘invisible’ base for the work’s content and decoration. 4 This pot’s narrow mouth and short neck, resting on high, broad shoulders, and its tall body tapering to a shallow foot, is highly reminiscent of a traditional Meiping ‘Plum’ vase from the Ming dynasty (Fig.1) a shape Perry also used for an earlier pair of vases made in 1984 (Fig 2).

This pot has been coil-built (as opposed to thrown on the wheel), a method which Perry prefers because, despite being rather laborious, it enables him to produce tall pots with a ‘slight quirkiness of asymmetry.’ 5 After building the form, Perry would have smoothed and ‘shaved’ it down to achieve an even surface to decorate. Next, he would have demarcated the areas intended for the transfers to ensure these were left unpainted and unstamped, before hand-painting the surrounding surface in green and brown coloured slip glazes. At this stage Perry would also have added the four circular patterned sprig moulds, introduced the words using both letter stamps and sgraffitto, and incised the drawings, before firing the pot for the first time in the kiln. After this initial firing the transfers would have been applied to the surface and a further glaze added to give it its ‘shiny’ appearance, before being fired for a second and final time at a low temperature. Although on the finished pot the transfers appear inset below the surface, giving the impression they were added first, this is not the case.

On encountering this work one’s eye is immediately arrested by the 12 large open-stock transfers which stand out starkly against the dark toned body. The ‘pretty’, twee imagery of the transfers - which include a Japanese floral print, daschunds, a train, horses, oriental scenes, a turnip, broad beans, boars and a teddy bear skating – give the viewer the initial impression that this is a purely decorative pot, however on closer inspection the surface reveals other, more provocative content which explores themes such as Perry’s ambivalent feelings towards the art world and the notion of making money (earning a living) from art. Indeed it is this tension between the appearance and the content of the pot that gives the work its potency, as Perry explains:

‘A lot of my work has always had a guerrilla tactic, a stealth tactic. I want to make something that lives with the eye as a beautiful piece of art, but on closer inspection, a polemic or an ideology will come out of it. Not so that it destroys the intrinsic pattern and beauty of it. I don’t want to sacrifice the aesthetic for the idea, I want the two to be so close that they live happily together, or maybe not happily, but so that there is a frisson.’ 6

Here, letters stamped into the surface read:

‘’I DO NOT WANT TO MEET YOU.
YOU COME AND BUY MY IDEAS.
YOU PAY MONEY FOR A PART OF MY LIFE.
THEN YOU GO HOME AND STAND AMONGST ALL THE OTHER HEADS YOU HAVE HUNTED.’’

The hostile tone of Perry’s words - which quite clearly address the collectors who purchase his work - convey his negative feelings towards the bourgeois aspiration and pretentiousness of the art world. Having himself come from humble beginnings in Essex, where he spent a somewhat troubled childhood secretly cross-dressing, Perry struggles to relate to this new class into which he has been ‘invited’. Indeed Perry was initially attracted to pottery because of its ‘down to earth’, ‘naff’ associations, which may explain his unease with the idea of where the works end up. 7 The words ‘‘You pay money for a part of my life,’’ meanwhile, suggests that Perry feels like a commodity, as the works he makes, which contain subject matter deeply rooted in his personal interests, feelings and experiences, are bought and sold to those who can afford them.

Other details on the surface include seven large, deeply sgrafittoed caricature-like faces – the largest of which appears to be a self-portrait of Perry, complete with pained expression, bloodshot eyes and the words ‘tortured soul’ emblazoned across his forehead (perhaps Perry is mocking the collector for the notion they buy into of him as an of ‘artistic genius’ 8), while the other unflattering portraits - surrounded by words such as ‘annoyed young man’, ‘charming boredom’, ‘knowing beauty’, ‘gorgeous snobbery’, ‘success’, and ‘sooo ironic’, could be interpreted as the art collectors that ‘feed’ off him. The eyes of each of the faces have been highlighted in white, emphasizing the idea that they are connoisseurs of the visual.

In contrast to Bernard Leach’s ‘less is more’ mantra, Perry adopts a ‘When in doubt, bung it on’ 9 approach for his pots, creating multi-faceted ‘busy’ surfaces full to the brim with juxtapositions of incongruous words and imagery, highly reminiscent of the aesthetic of the elaborate collages he made in his art college sketchbooks, which comprised scraps from a variety of sources including encyclopedias and textbooks. Indeed of these Perry has said, ‘The collages’ obsessive detail, busyness and horror vacui set the tone for the work I make now: even if it is a pot that doesn’t have an image on it, it has to have texture; it has to have marbling or crackle. I find it difficult to leave empty space, my instinct is to cover up emptiness and always elaborate, to my detriment sometimes. It’s part of my psychological makeup that I’m a detail freak.’ 10

For more information about the artist and his ceramics, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI2JG67b-fs

1 The artist in the foreword to Grayson Perry Ceramics, Birch and Conran, London, exhibition catalogue, 16 September – 9 October 1987
2 The artist cited in Wendy Jones, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, Vintage Books, London, 2007, p47
3 The artist cited in Jones, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, Vintage Books, London, 2007, p186
4 The artist cited in Guerilla Tactics, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, exhibition catalogue, 2002, p14
5 The artist cited in Jacky Klein, Grayson Perry, Updated and Expanded Edition, Thames & Hudson, 2013, p49
6 The artist cited in Grayson Perry – Guerrilla Tactics, exh. catalogue, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, p24
7 The artist cited in Jones, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, Vintage Books, London, 2007, p192-3
8 Similar themes are explored in Perry’s plate Hand it to you on a plate, 1988
9 The artist cited in Jacky Klein, Quoted in Sarah Howells ‘Sex Pots’, World of Interiors, July, 1993, p101
10 The artist cited in Jones, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, Vintage Books, London, 2007, p183