Sketchbooks

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Curriculum Links Geography: Trade links, digital mapping, ordinance survey maps, detailed sketching of maps. History: Create maps inspired by your chosen ancient civilisation topic e.g. an Anglo Saxon settlement or village. Maths: Pictorial representations, 2D / 3D shapes. PSHE: Collaboration, Peer Discussion. English: Leaflets, posters Celebrating the power of contemporary drawing, this display at the British Museum (12 September 2019–12 January 2020) explores how artists have used the medium to examine themes including identity, place and memory. In the special talk (Wednesday 21 November 2018; sold out) the artist discusses his life, career and current exhibition Vanité, Identité, Sexualité at La Monnaie de Paris (until 3 February 2019). Perry’s ceramics, sculptures, prints and large-scale tapestries could have been made for this space.’

I make the work I like. But a nice spinoff benefit of that is that I bring a kind of audience that isn’t necessarily solely into difficult, conceptualized 21st-century art."He repeats this apology at the opening of the show – and again on the Sydney Opera House stage where he gives a lecture entitled: “How to be an artist (just like me).” Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance. There is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images of Perry as "Claire", his female alter-ego, and "Alan Measles", his childhood teddy bear, often appear. He has made a number of documentary television programmes and has curated exhibitions. He has published two autobiographies, Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (2007) and The Descent of Man (2016), written and illustrated a graphic novel, Cycle of Violence (2012), written a book about art, Playing to the Gallery (2014), and published his illustrated Sketchbooks (2016). Various books describing his work have been published. In 2013 he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures. The biggest ever exhibition of Sir Grayson Perry's work, covering his 40-year career. Perry has gone from taking pottery evening classes to winning the Turner Prize, presenting television programmes on Channel 4 and writing acclaimed books. Pottery allowed him the opportunity to indulge his fascination with sex, Punk, and counterculture, amongst other things, in the most unlikely and polite of artforms. Today he is one of Britain's most celebrated artists and cultural figures. As his latest show opens at Victoria Miro in Mayfair, the artist tells Vogue about satirising the art-buying habits of wealthy collectors, his alter ego Claire's evolving style, and "biting the hand that feeds him" with his tongue-in-cheek pottery.

Grayson Perry | Smash Hits brought together all the artist’s meticulously detailed prints and imaginary maps. The exhibition featured many of his tapestries, such as the rarely shown Walthamstow Tapestry (2009) which, at 15-metres in length, presents birth-to-death journey through shopping and brand names. Visitors also encountered the intricate cast-iron ship, Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman (2011) which was the centrepiece of Perry’s 2011 exhibition of the same name at the British Museum. The tomb is a memorial to all the anonymous craftsmen of history. Two rooms centred on the monumental tapestry series: Vanity of Small Differences (2012), which focus on class and are loosely based on William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, as well as House for Essex tapestries (2015), which explore the life of a fictional Essex woman Julie Cope. The tapestries were inspired by Perry’s trips to three regions in England where he met different groups considered to be working class, middle class and upper class. His interviews, photographs, notes and sketchbook drawings of his journey helped him to investigate the tastes of different social circles. The artist'sjourneys through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells and The Cotswolds in England were documented in the television series All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, which wasfirst aired on Channel 4 in June 2012.

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The process of creating the works was documented in last year’s Channel 4 documentary, All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry. The British care about taste because it’s inextricable woven into our system of social class’, writes artist Grayson Perry. Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! reviewed by Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times An intelligent evening (2 November 2017, sold out) of laughs, discussion, insight and costume changes in this one-off show at the London Palladium.

For decades, Perry worked in relative anonymity. As a young squatting artist, he couldn’t even afford central heating. That is, until he won the Turner prize in 2003. He is now a beloved public figure, appealing equally to the intellectual elite and television-consuming masses. The exhibition (18 March - 18 June 2017) brings together works by Old Masters and contemporary artists to examine our relationship with the countryside.The exhibition (14 September – 3 December 2017) tells the story of studio pottery in Britain, from the early twentieth century to the present. With a gorgeously colourful and tactile cloth cover, the book offers gorgeous close ups of the works, revealing the intricacies that go into each piece. Perry has become a pin-sharp observer of contemporary class divisions and territories, a cross-dressing Hogarth of the suburbs. The felt pen-and-ink drawings for the series of tapestries called The Vanity of Small Differences have a ritual energy full of art-school echoes that his notes make clear – “abandoned shoes ref to marriage of Arnolfini” he will write, in a tableau that became The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal; or “protest camp in Brueghel-ish style” in The Agony in the Car Park.