by Wendy Jones
I had made things at college with clay, buggering about, but not learned about pottery. Clay was a material I could mould; it didn’t have anything to do with ceramics in the classical sense. I had used clay as if it were Plasticine, then hoped the sculpture would survive in the kiln; very rudimentary sculptures which, more often than not, would come out badly.
The teacher at the evening classes, Sarah Sanderson, had all the attributes of a classical pottery teacher: she wore patterned trousers and liked all things Japanese. A self-confessed tea snob, she always brewed her own cup of tea at break rather than drink tea from the canteen. She was a very competent thrower who threw small porcelain pieces and she was a good teacher in that she took command of the class as well as giving clear instructions. I was hard-working, but at the same time I wanted to get on with my own work independently. She would give me advice about how to get what I wanted or I would pick up things from overhearing what she was telling other people. This was the first time I had been exposed to proper lessons, pottery skills and traditional techniques like coiling, glazing, stencilling, all of which I now use. The first thing I made was a devil giving birth. I’d embedded fragments of glass in it, which melted. That got stolen.
Collage, 1983.
‘Baba Yaga’s Hut’
I went to classes once a week to begin with but enjoyed it so much that I wanted to do more. First it was Thursdays, then Wednesdays as well and then I started going to the Friday daytime class because on Fridays there was no teacher so I could do my own work undisturbed. I only paid £1 per lesson because I was on the dole.
It was around this time that, according to my mother, my stepfather had an affair with someone on his paper round at the American Air Base and my mother decided she wanted a divorce. I was urging her, ‘Yeah, go for it!’ She told me all about it during our fortnightly phone calls. My stepfather apparently got down on bended knee and declared his undying love and, I think, need. He had a romantic vision of them going away and having a lovely new start so they sold the big Barrett house in Great Bardfield and bought a dairy farm in Scotland – I got roped in to driving the removal lorry. As soon as we had unloaded the lorry my youngest brother, who was twelve, was being taught how to look after a dairy herd. It was disastrous; milk prices dropped, then they were hit by mad cow disease.
When I returned to London after helping my mum and stepfather move, I went to the V&A to look at ceramics – I hadn’t looked at ceramics properly before and the V&A had a vast collection. It was a treasure trove and I was very inspired by it, particularly the slipware dishes by Thomas Toft. Slipware is traditional English earthenware, usually in earthy colours – brown, white, black, beige – and the decoration is done with liquid clay, which is almost like icing. Some of the earliest decorative ware dates from the seventeenth and even sixteenth centuries, and they are very prized now. Thomas Toft, who died in 1689, made large meat plates called chargers, decorated with coats of arms, Charles I or a bloke on a horse, very free and naïve because they were drawn with a slip trailer. Slip trailing had been a traditional technique in pottery and this was the period when it was refined. Toft was the most famous because his were the most elaborate and accomplished chargers; they were big, about fifty centimetres in diameter, naïve, but fun pieces that would have been hung on the wall. There was a certain old-worldly half-timbered pubness about his work that I liked. After looking at the old English slipware in the V&A I made a sculpture of a boar.
We’d had a history teacher at school who was a naval type with a twiddly beard and moustache, and at the end of one term he said ‘I’ll give you a treat’, so he read us some salacious stories out of history. One story was about King James, the gay one. When the king and his men went hunting and caught the deer, they would slit open the deer’s stomach so all the guts would pour out, then the king would take off his shoes and breeches, and waddle about in the intestines: he’d get turned on by this, it was a fetish of the king’s and that interested me. So I made this little figure of the king cavorting inside the belly of a boar in Ye Olde English Pottery.
I learned that you could place certain materials on the clay and they would melt very uncontrollably in the kiln so I put some pieces of glass on the figurine that oozed into the clay. I had a huge collection of coloured glass from Portsmouth beach, which was covered in sea-worn glass from a Victorian rubbish dump, and I used to mudlark by the Thames for chips of pottery, splinters of glass and interestingly shaped pieces of metal that I’d incorporate into the sculptures.
My initial frustration was that everything in pottery takes a long time, with a lot of waiting around for things to dry. I would be working on a piece when I’d get to a point where I couldn’t do any more because it would need to dry, so I always needed to be working on two or three projects simultaneously. Very soon I was producing two or three pieces a week. Everybody else produced two or three pieces a term.
In those early lessons I was being provocative, I was an angry young man, I wanted to offend so I was using the rudest images I could think of: women being shagged by wolves, handicapped Fascists, Thalidomide girls, lots of swastikas, S & M hospitals, all the stuff that was free-flowing very crudely out of my mind. The other people in the class were a mixed bunch and I always thought no one was taking any notice of what I was putting on my pots. Apparently some students led a delegation to the head of the college to complain about me. To his credit the head said, ‘Oh, leave him alone. Let him get on with it.’
Although all the most important elements of my future life were present, at the age of twenty-two I didn’t know that pottery and pot making would become the central medium of my career and my exhibitions so far. A year into pottery classes I decided, ‘Right, I’ve got to get an exhibition,’ got together slides of my work and walked into a little gallery opposite the British Museum, showed the slides to the owner who put me in a mixed show in December 1983. What characterised the period from the evening classes until I was in my thirties, when I got married and my daughter came along, was that I lived life to the full in the here now, and didn’t think too much about my past or my future. I did the things you do in your twenties: I went out, I got drunk, took a few drugs, had a lot of sex, and somehow I got a lot of pottery made as well. After seven years Jen and I split up – she put up with my affairs, then had one of her own and left me for someone else. I broke contact with my mother in 1990 when I went to visit taking my future wife, Phil, whom I met in evening classes. My mother attacked Phil and said, ‘You must be desperate to marry a transvestite.’ My childhood in Essex and the events described in this book would overshadow me until I went into therapy at the age of thirty-eight and Claire, who was always around, would then be able to blossom fully. Claire and her frocks would continue to crop up in my art; a lot of things that are part of my life appear in my art.
Some of the things I made when I was in my first year of pottery classes were bad. Often they would literally fall apart. I found the communal glaze firing frustrating – my work was never fired in optimal conditions, tending to be under-fired, which meant the glaze looked like semi-translucent snot. Some of the early pots have a horrible texture. They were failures. They were irredeemably ugly objects; either the glaze didn’t turn transparent, or the colours were not what I intended. I would get work out of the kiln and the teacher would say, ‘Shame it’s cracked,’ and I’d reply, ‘Ah, but that’s a genuine crack, that’s not one of your pottery technique cracks. It’s a genuine mistake by someone who really can’t do pottery very well yet, and it is worth a dozen of your carefully contrived Japanese-style cracks.’
I often create pots difficult to make and am overambitious technically, contriving to make them very complex to balance. I deliberately don’t do tests. I’m loath to try out new techniques by doing a maquette, a dummy run, because the second time I use it is never as good as the first. Instead, I try new techniques I’ve not used before – perhaps a combination of colour or a new transfer – on major pieces. It could
go disastrously wrong and sometimes it does. Often I rescue a pot, usually with gold lustre. I bodge things over but they always scream ‘bodged’ to me and probably to other potters too. But bodged is OK because it is part of being human. I want an element of bodging in my work – I wouldn’t want it to be calculatedly perfect. I want it to be slightly flawed. Sometimes I’m almost disappointed when things work exactly as I imagined.
I’m constantly searching for a balance between slightly clunky awkwardness and genuine sensuous beauty. I start a pot with an atmosphere, which is a combination of style, emotion and content. But the perfection I am after in my imagination, the fuzzy golden glow, can never exist. I want the pot to have a specific feeling but then I have to put that feeling into a material object that is subject to the whim of technique and practicality. Every time I open the kiln, there is an air of disappointment. Often I open the kiln and hate the piece. It’s the search for the perfect pot. It’s the fight against the terrible cruelty of the material reality in the traumatic birth from my imagination. I’m not in love with my pots; I’m in love with the sensual beauty they can give.
I didn’t really think pottery was my metier. I didn’t suddenly switch and think, ‘This is it.’ It took me a long time, between ten to fifteen years after these lessons and almost thirty years after my very first pottery lesson at primary school, to realise that pottery was my prime medium. Even now it’s up for grabs. I enjoy pottery but it’s not as if I was born to do it. In ten years’ time I could make vases as a sideline if something else came along that I was passionate about. At the moment I’m very excited about printmaking.
When I started pottery lessons I was more interested in film-making because I enjoyed making Super-8 films so much. Pottery was a funny dalliance that I did as a tease. I had no investment in it, which was a healthy position to be in as an artist. I had no preconceptions, no agenda; it was me mucking around at something I liked. I returned to my bedroom fantasy mentality of Alan Measles and his world while I was making things with clay. When I was a child growing up in rural Essex I didn’t have any agenda over the many years I spent playing with Alan Measles and in pottery classes I didn’t have any career agenda around ceramics. The searchlight of my career was pointing to film, which was fashionable and slotted in well with the trendy lifestyle I aspired to. Pottery was a joke. Pottery wasn’t a glamorous proposition – it still isn’t. Jen, Fiona and I aspired to glamour; we were emerging from New Romanticism. I went nightclubbing every night; pottery and nightclubs aren’t easy bedfellows! I was interested in fashion and hanging out with groovy people. Working with clay was unhip, really uncool. I could only tolerate ceramics being square because of the nature of Jen and Fiona, and our raucous laughter about the notion of being fashionable. The self-conscious ridiculousness of being funky was all so funny. We always had a perspective about our aspirations.
I was attracted to pottery because it was naff; that was the subtext. I was aware of ceramics being the underdog and that was one of its saving graces. It’s very British; pottery will never become bad taste. It will always have that woody, nutty, wholesome, truth-to-materials-ness around it. It was never going to be a flashy, gay, window-dressing art, it was always going to be humpy, heterosexual and earthy. However trite and dilettante the images I put on the clay, the material would bring it, literally, down to earth. One of the great things about ceramics is it is not shocking so I thought, ‘I can be as outrageous as I like here because the vice squad is never going to raid a pottery exhibition.’
Kinky Sex, 1983
I had seen the ceramics at the V&A, returned to the evening classes and asked the teacher, ‘Have you got a plate mould? I’d like to make a plate.’ The very first one worked reasonably well – because I put a coin over Jesus’s cock it appeared as if he had had an enormous wet dream while being crucified. So I made my first ever plate, which was called, Kinky Sex.
Refugees from Childhood, 2001
Divorce Present, 1992
Black Dog, 2004
Collage from an early sketchbook
‘One must suffer like a woman’
Neo-naturist, as Burnham Wood
Grayson in the squat as Claire
Grayson and Claire by the stream, moon spinning dreams
Hot Afternoon in 75, 1999
Revenge of the Alison Girls, 2000
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Grayson Perry
Wendy Jones for being pure and unshockable, and for laughing at my offensive jokes. Rex Bradley for giving me back the deeds to my interior landscape. Phil, for her strength and love, and Flo for being Flo. Jen for seven precious years of youth together. Christine, for her creative energy. Mary and Arthur for solid love.
Wendy Jones
I would like wholeheartedly to thank the following people who, from the inception of the book, have encouraged and guided me, supported and taught me, even told me off on occasion. Leila Berg for being a safe haven for many years. Sarah Bylinski for babysitting. George Frankl for his astonishing mind and his love. Ruth Freeman for her reliability and wisdom. David Godwin and Sarah Savitt for doing business with panache on my behalf. Jane Monson for her purity and poetry. Julie and Colin for telling me stories about their childhoods. Mary Mike for her merry dance on a radical path. Grayson Perry for trusting me. Angela Price for gentle trustworthiness. Lorna Sage for ferocious teaching. Will Self for telling me, in no uncertain terms, which way was the wrong way. Clare Sims, my partner in crime in all things literary, for a lot of encouragement and savvy advice. Jenny Uglow for warm and incisive editing. Rob Allen, for convincing me the Luddites were wrong, and for giving me love, joy and Solly.
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Copyright © Wendy Jones and Grayson Perry 2006
Wendy Jones and Grayson Perry have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the experiences and recollections of Grayson Perry. In a few cases details, and names of people and places, have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such respects, the contents of this book are true. While the publishers have taken care to check where possible, they have not verified all the information and do not warrant its veracity in all respects.
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First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Chatto & Windus
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