Untitled (She Is My Mind) belongs to a period in Grayson Perry’s career which has recently been characterized as his ‘pre-therapy years’ (1982-1994). This epithet was suggested by an exhibition at the Holburne Museum, Bath, and it is a subject of growing public and academic interest. (Perry underwent six years of psychotherapy in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in the course of which he worked through problems arising from his fraught childhood, when his father was absent and his stepfather was abusive.) Investigations into the period have been assisted by Perry himself who has said that ‘I look back at my early pieces now and I find them delightful and hilarious. I enjoy their frenetic energy and humour but I wince at some of the texts stamped into the surface.’

The use of stamped text plays an important role in Untitled (She Is My Mind), helping to communicate the work’s theme. The swirling pattern in the trough of the plate and the stencilled plant designs around the cavetto are subsidiary motifs which play a supporting decorative function. Around the rim of the plate is written a text of Perry’s own devising:

MY MIND IS MY MASTER
MY BODY MY SLAVE
MY SOUL MY WHIP AND MY BOND

These words evoke an anxiety around his nascent transvestitism and the tension between ambivalent gender and biological reality. An interest in sadomasochism is also strongly apparent. In larger letters drawn into the glaze at the other end of the plate, the related thought is written:

SHE IS MY MIND

With these words Perry was perhaps identifying his mental life with his female alter-ego, ‘Claire’, and his body with his natural masculine persona.

The introduction of text in his ceramics grew from an interest in the uncouth stylisation of seventeenth-century English pottery which Perry discovered in the Victoria & Albert Museum. He has cited the slipware dishes of Thomas Toft (d. 1698) (fig. 1) as an influence, and his work is somewhat apparent in the design of Untitled (She Is My Mind). As Perry recalled, ‘There was a certain old-worldly half-timbered pubness about his work that I liked.’

There is a story that some of Perry's own semen was mixed into the glaze on this ceramic. His seditious approach to pottery involved a variety of unconventional techniques, amongst which this may have been one; the story is certainly plausible.