To coincide with Piano Nobile’s Frieze New York Viewing Room and a new exhibition, Grayson Perry: Ceramics and Prints, InSight considers the artist’s early ceramics – an area of growing public and academic interest.
I was carrying a lot of unexamined baggage from my childhood. These fermenting emotions [of anger and bitterness] were at once powering my work, but also, I am sure, making me a tricky character to deal with.
Perry started by making decorative plates, only later progressing to vases. Through the 1980s and ‘90s, he made continual technical advances with the basic components of potting – clay, slip, glaze – as well as trying a range of additive techniques, adding coloured glass and coins to the clay fabric, incising and printing the wet clay with stamps and lettering, glazing with stencils, and later introducing transfer-printed imagery. Even his potter’s marks assumed a role in his work’s bustling iconography. He enjoyed ‘the low status of pottery’, rejecting the bravura studio techniques of throwing and spinning and instead preferring to piece the clay together by hand. The bricolage approach was instinctive to Perry, who confessedly ‘[finds] it difficult to leave empty space’.
In 2020, the Holburne Museum in Bath held a pioneering exhibition which shed new light on Perry’s early period (1982-1994), a time which the exhibition dubbed his ‘pre-therapy years’. (The show will travel to York and then Norwich later this year.) As Perry explained in the catalogue,
This show is called ‘the Pre-Therapy Years’ because I sometimes joke that Victoria Miro was fortunate to take me on as one of her artists in 2003, after I had been through psychotherapy for six years. The relationship between artist and art dealer is often fraught and in the previous twenty years I had loaded a lot of shit onto a few of them.
One of the recipients of this ‘shit’ was presumably Anthony d’Offay, who gave Perry solo exhibitions in 1994 and 1996, and whose face is stencilled onto the vase entitled Layers of Meaninglessness. Produced in 1994, the vase came at a turning point and shows a new confidence in the artist. The decorative elements of the vase, its glazes and transfer-printed imagery, are harnessed to an overarching concept which is articulated in both the title and stamped lettering on the object itself.
The style that Perry developed in the late 1980s and early ‘90s is personally distinctive. It resists art historical analysis – its individuality was one of its self-consciously defining features – and relatively few progenitors can be identified. The eclectic effervescence of Britain’s art scene in the 1980s does provide clues, however. Perry’s dealers at the time, Birch & Conran, held a retrospective of Eileen Agar’s work in 1987. Though she had very different reference points to Perry, Agar’s late acrylic paintings show a love of sensation and – most importantly – a hatred of stylistic or ideological purity.
There is no suggestion that Perry responded directly to Agar’s work, yet the key to understanding art of this period – Perry’s and Agar’s alike – was that its eclecticism derived from an avant-garde irreverence towards precedent. Earlier art was of little interest because it was in the past and it was impersonal: a first-person, confessional art like Perry’s required not just a personal iconography but also an array of personally assembled devices – the layered glazes, textual additions, potter’s marks, transfer-printed images, and so on. It is the ‘personality’ of Perry’s means and his message which distinguishes his art, not just in the work of his ‘pre-therapy years’ but in the work he continues to produce today.
