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Grayson] Perry has been cross-dressing since he was a teenager, he said, but has always been heterosexual. He has gone through various looks—dowdy housewife, lady-who-lunches, corsets and high heels—but settled on Claire's Raggedy-Ann dresses and little-girl shoes because they reflect his current emotional needs.
Pottery presented itself unexpectedly ... when Mr. Perry tagged along with a housemate in London to an evening pottery class. The medium electrified him, in part because it seemed to represent the opposite of what was happening in British art at the time. If his contemporaries were pushing the limits, "making art out of anything and everything," Mr. Perry said, he was rebelling in the other direction, "finding the naffest"—nerdiest—"thing you could do."
"Pottery seemed like a very dark choice," he said. "It's sort of like, it's O.K. to put a shark in a tank—but pottery?"
"Also," he said, "the blandness appealed to me. I could be as brash and noisy as I wanted without really causing much fuss. You're never going to get arrested for a pottery exhibit."
Mr. Perry's first piece, a plate, depicted Jesus on the cross with the words "kinky sex" written across the bottom ... The pieces all look pretty and classical, until you get close. In "The Plight of the Sensitive Child," young girls are shown smoking crack. "We've Found the Body of Your Child" is about the frenzied, rabid hunt for a pedophile in a Bruegelian landscape. The pot is printed with phrases Mr. Perry said he remembers his mother using when he was young, including "Never have kids" and "All men are bastards."
Mr. Perry is inspired by artists like Bosch, Van Eyck and Bruegel as well as by the work of Henry Darger, the Chicago outsider artist who lived on the outskirts of sanity and whose art included lurid and shocking scenes.
- SARAH LYALL, "A Trendy Tranny Potter's New Purse," new york times May 2, 2004
posted May 03, 2004 in art, print. 2005