Early on in their relationship, Grayson Perry’s wife, Philippa, turned up at his London home to find a smartly dressed businesswoman open the door. Confused, Philippa asked for Grayson. “Who wants him?” retorted Perry playfully. The woman was, of course, Perry himself.
He whisked Philippa to a transvestite club, noting now, with a big, self-deprecating laugh, that she was faintly disappointed. Not because Perry had flipped genders, but because, as befitted his dour and somewhat matronly clothes, the night was more Women’s Institute than glamorous cabaret.
I meet Perry backstage at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art where he is launching his new blockbuster survey, My Pretty Little Art Career. An artistic triumph spanning three decades, the exhibition features more than 60 works by the Turner prize winner, from the ceramics that made him famous to his vast, imposing tapestries and impishly decorated sketchbooks.
Casting over this visit to Australia – only his second to the country – is the shadow of a recent faux pas. In October, Perry upset many people by questioning whether Aboriginal painters should be considered contemporary artists, describing their inclusion as the cultural “elephant in the room”.
Raffish, good-natured, and quintessentially English in his propensity to say sorry, Perry is now at agonies to insist his comments were ill-informed. “I really did lose sleep over it – I thought, ‘Oh god they’re going to hate me!’” he says, clutching his head. “I just projected my own prejudices.”
He repeats this apology at the opening of the show – and again on the Sydney Opera House stage where he gives a lecture entitled: “How to be an artist (just like me).”
Most recognisable in his female alter ego, Claire, Perry today has squeezed his six-foot-something frame – a jumbled heap of long, gangly limbs – into more manly attire. He wears a bright orange T-shirt with striped braces, pale pink socks, and powder blue trousers that bring out his clear cobalt eyes. Crowning it all is a fine and fair mop of Willy Wonka-style hair.
“I’m as masculine as the next man – get me on the mountain bike and I’m vicious,” he says.
Now in his mid-50s, he is in possession of a certain rapscallion charm. As Claire, however, he confides: “I was never a sex bomb.” Originally modelled on female news anchors, with Princess Diana and Camilla Parker-Bowles thrown into the mix, the Claire of the past was a tad mumsy in her stiff pencil skirts, prudent and modestly dressed.
Not anymore. As Perry has got older, Claire’s outfits have become increasingly outlandish (he has called her Bo Peep look the “crack cocaine of femininity”).
Perry tells me, with a naughty grin, about his plans to wear a dress shaped like a “huge nappy”, with a pom-pom teddy bear on the crotch and bejewelled puff sleeves – if it’s not too hot. “I couldn’t live in a place like Sydney and very easily be a tranny,” he confesses. “You want to cover your flesh because you don’t want to reveal your manliness to the world.”
For decades, Perry worked in relative anonymity. As a young squatting artist, he couldn’t even afford central heating. That is, until he won the Turner prize in 2003. He is now a beloved public figure, appealing equally to the intellectual elite and television-consuming masses.
He became not only the first contemporary artist to deliver the annual Reith Lectures for BBC’s Radio 4 in 2013, but also presented documentaries for Channel 4 with titles such as Why Men Wear Frocks. Last year, Prince Charles awarded him a CBE, an order of the British Empire (Perry wore a mother of the bride outfit).
Fame has come with costs. For him, part of the appeal of cross-dressing is the sexual kick. “Humiliation is a massive turn-on,” he says. “One of the things it’s ruined for me is that I’m no longer the anonymous pervert walking down the street. Before it was quite fun being the weirdo everyone stared at. Now I’m Grayson Perry. [The public] are not going to shout ‘fucking poof’, they’re more likely to say: ‘Oh, it’s Grayson Perry, mate, like on the TV’.”
Born in 1960 to a working class family in Chelmsford, the heart of Essex, Perry’s mother ran off with the milkman when he was four. Faced with a violent stepfather and a mother with mental health issues (from whom he is now estranged), he took solace in his teddy bear, Alan Measles. At 12, he started to secretly cross-dress in his sister’s clothes.
Over the years, Alan Measles became an almighty and omnipresent companion. He features in many of Perry’s works, from his first tapestry Vote Alan Measles for God (2008), in which the red, roaring teddy brandishes a suicide-belt atop the Twin Towers, to an intricate other-worldly shrine in which Alan Measles sits likes a Hindu deity.
When Perry mounted a coming out ceremony for Claire in 2000 in a London gallery, he decorated his girly silk brocade frock with the teddy alongside penises tied prettily with green ribbons. A very worn, fragile Alan Measles now sits on a throne at Perry’s home in London’s Islington, where he lives with Philippa, a psychotherapist (their daughter Florence is in her early 20s and works for BuzzFeed).
Perry is best known for his intricate and subversive ceramics, which he handcrafts without the usual army of artist’s assistants. He remembers the response when he took up pottery evening classes in the 1980s. “Friends looked at me and said: ‘Pottery!’ The quote marks were hovering around the air,” he laughs. “And I thought, yeah, there’s a charge around this. The art world is going to struggle with this one.”
Dismissed as a “craft”, pottery was viewed as domestic, feminine and working-class, but Perry realised with glee that “the vice squad was not going to raid an exhibition of pottery”. His delicate, intricate ceramics, inspired by classical forms, were a perfect canvas for debauched, lascivious details that lampooned British class, identity, and sexuality.
Some are overtly salacious; others, like 2004’s Precious Boys, sad and soulful. The latter is an imitation of a Japanese Art Nouveau style vase, replete with delicate water lilies but features men from a transvestite magazine to which Perry once subscribed. Staring out woefully, they are serious and dejected, male faces in starched skirts.
Next year, Perry will broadcast a new documentary on masculinity. “Maybe if they didn’t tense up, always need to be competitive, always need to be in charge, always need to be the one at the top, men might find that there are benefits from releasing the grip of power,” he muses. At the MCA’s opening night, he speaks to the crowd in a sparkly silver dress, his hair straightened into a blonde bob, his arched eyebrows painted on, topped by lashings of glittery eye shadow.
Seeing his life’s toil all laid out on one floor amounts to an “existential crisis”, he chortles, only half tongue-in-cheek. This may be his pretty little art career. But as his wife affectionately has to keep reminding him: “You’re more than your work.” Then again, in life as in art, Perry adds, “to be decorative is to be noble”.
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