This ceramic comes from an early period in Grayson Perry’s career, a rare and important work from his early maturity. The plate is made of glazed earthenware. This is one of the earliest moments where the artist’s riotous style is displayed in full, complete with an eclectic and tightly-packed composition in which Perry strove to say everything at once. The use of multiple stencils, an incised surface and inscribed verse are all key elements in his distinctive and highly original ceramic idiom. The work has only recently left the artist’s studio, having remained there since it was made in the nineteen-eighties. The Essex landscape is prominent in this work, and Perry relates his whore to a squalid and parodically derelict place in the county. An old car languishes in the foreground, along with a tyre and a swing. Though Perry addresses his native Essex, a tired and unappealing ‘home of many contradictions’, he also draws on wider literary and ceramic traditions. He alludes to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English Delftware, witty ceramic bowls and beakers which were often inscribed with sexualised, satirical or jingoistic verse. The mock formality of Perry’s verse (‘She reaches for no heights nor is her beauty much acclaimed’) contrasts with brash street language, scrawled in a casual graffiti style. Immediately below an unglazed terracotta crown, the inscription reads ‘Essex Boys Rool’. Rather than express himself directly, Perry counterpoints a veneer of gaucheness with a serious underlying social critique. Though The Whore of Essex is overwhelmingly playful in its varied finish and accumulative inscriptions, it addresses a downtrodden and disenfranchised citizenry. This is most apparent in a sister work of the same title, also from approximately 1986, which depicts the eponymous whore as a staring, big-nosed hag. The layers of fantasy and wit with which Perry embroiders his subject conceal a social imperative, bringing to light a troubled underclass in Thatcher’s Britain. In praising a figure of admonishment, the tart or floosy, he gave them a voice and set about causing a minor revolution in social relations. It is ironic that, despite producing such acerbic, critical artworks, Perry has risen to the height of the contemporary art world, his anti-establishmentarian values persisting to this day despite his status as a Royal Academician and a commander in the Order of the British Empire.