Grayson Perry delights in shocking, confrontational imagery. Some of the work from his angry, early period was underpinned by sadomasochistic preoccupations. Six Figure Group includes a bald, hook-handed woman on the left-hand side; a straight-jacketed and hooded figure to her right; and a woman, placed at the centre of the composition, with a penis and a transparent dress. As he has said, ‘Sado-masochism, bondage, ritual humiliation, cross-dressing and infantilism formed my core subject matter’. The basic shape of this platter was created using a mould which Perry had access to. While the clay was still wet, Perry stamped it with two of his potter’s marks. Both are positioned at the lower right-hand side: on the left, the stamp reads ‘T.V.’; on the right, the stamp is in the shape of a smiley-face with a long nose. Both reflect the artist’s affinity with low culture, which he delights in contrasting with high culture. These potter’s marks belong to a catalogue of imagery and symbols which characterise Perry’s work of the 1980s and ‘90s; his desire to create meaning in his art compelled him to use figural imagery and iconography, of which these stamps are further manifestations. * Once he had completed his training as a fine artist in 1982, Perry has spoken of how appealing he found the cussed lowliness of pottery. ‘The low status of pottery somehow acted as a semi-permeable membrane to keep me at an intellectual and aesthetic distance from the orthodoxies of the fine art world.’ This work was made at a time when he was growing in confidence with the basic components of potting. ‘Over the decade 1984-94 I gradually became more technically proficient, inching closer to my goal of having the relaxed fluency to use clay, slip, glaze and enamel in the same way that I used paper, pen, paint and collage in my sketchbooks.’ The handicraft ripple and pleasing asymmetry of the plate indicate that it was made – and not merely decorated – by Perry. Six Figure Group was produced in a period of Perry’s career recently characterized as his ‘pre-therapy years’ (1982-1994). (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.) This epithet has been suggested by an exhibition at the Holburne Museum, Bath, held in 2020, and the period is a subject of growing public and academic interest. 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.’