Grayson Perry

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2007

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the artist Grayson Perry. For more than 20 years his work was broadly unknown outside the narrow confines of the art world. But in 2003 he became a household name after a collection of his exquisitely ornate pots won him art's most prestigious award, the Turner Prize. He's described as 'the hottest potter in the world' but newspaper headlines describing his success focused at least as much on his clothes as his art - when he collected the prize he wore a lilac party dress with a bow in his hair.

He started dressing in his sister's clothes when he was a child - initially as part of his imaginative games and then for an erotic thrill. In part, women's clothes represented the tender emotions he was too scared to show in his repressive and sometimes frightening family home. Now, they're a way of controlling how people see him, what kind of attention he attracts and, if nothing else, they're a unique selling point. He acknowledges the debt he owes to his profession; only the arts would tolerate, he says, a transvestite potter from Essex.

Favourite track: Prophecies by Philip Glass Book: An art book on Gothic and Renaissance altar pieces Luxury: Loads of really good pens and paper

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is the artist Grayson Perry. He's famous for two things, his pots and his frocks. His classically shaped vases
0:35.8	are meticulously crafted and highly decorative, but the impact of their immediate beauty is
0:40.9	subverted somewhat by the darkly disturbing nature of the scenes they
0:44.8	often depict. Pedophilia, death and sadomasochism are recurring themes. Indeed, he himself
0:51.7	survived a traumatic childhood, riven with aggression and insecurity,
0:56.2	retreating at a young age to a fantasy world of imaginary characters, and discovering relief
1:01.5	in the illicit thrill of dressing up in secret in his sister's ballet clothes.
1:06.0	In 2003 he won the highly prestigious Turner Prize for his ceramics.
1:11.0	He chose to collect the award wearing a lilac party frock and a bow in his hair.
1:16.0	The art world's been good to me, he says. There aren't many other worlds that would be so accepting of a transvestite potter from Essex.
1:24.0	Grayson, does it bother you that you seem as well known for your transvesticism as you do for your
1:29.2	art?
1:30.2	Sometimes slightly, but I mean I knew there was always going to be good PR value in wearing a frog and if if I have a label as a transvestite potter at least I have a label
1:40.0	you know so I'm I'm not going to regret it and when you see pictures of yourself
1:44.2	then in the media and indeed certainly when you won the Turner Prize did it make
1:48.1	you think that maybe it hadn't been a wise choice to wear the dress to the award
1:51.8	ceremony should you have gone as yourself?
1:54.0	Oh God, no.
1:56.0	I mean, I'd got there by mucking about.
1:58.0	I mean, I regard making art as mucking about.
	...

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