Telegraph.co.uk
Transvestite artist Grayson Perry’s new exhibition focuses on Victorian attitudes towards death, religion – and their kinky clothing. He talks to Alastair Sooke
Grayson Perry is in his studio in Walthamstow, east London, reflecting on life as a successful British artist. In a tight white Paul Smith T-shirt, his shaggy beach-blond hair mussed up around his face, he looks like an ageing surfer. But the night before, attending the glitzy opening of the Royal Academy summer show, he went for a very different look.
“I had this outfit on with a sequinned codpiece,” he explains. “And I arrived on the red carpet just behind Claudia Schiffer. So I’m standing next to her with this big codpiece, she’s there looking gorgeous and all the paparazzi are thinking: ‘Result.’ And now here I am in Walthamstow. That’s the sliding scale of weirdness I have to deal with.”
But hang on a tick. That weirdness is of his making. Everybody knows that the words “Grayson Perry” are synonymous with “transvestite potter”. The 46-year-old accepted the 2003 Turner Prize as his alter ego Claire, a chaste little girl with a dress sense like Goldilocks, so no wonder his cross-dressing hogs the limelight more than his ceramics.
Well yes, Perry concedes. “It’s good PR,” he says. “But I get bored of answering questions about being a transvestite. It comes out of my mouth dry as cream-cracker crumbs. That’s why I did the book.”