Sex, drags and pottery roll

When a bid to map his own identity morphed into a quest to trace the essence of Englishness, Sir Grayson Perry set out on a white-van journey across the country. He tells Charlotte Mullins what he found and why he's showing it in Scotland

- Charlotte Mullins

ONE of my favourite ever things was being COUNTRY LIFE’s page three!’ declares Sir Grayson Perry, the award-winning artist and television presenter who appeared on the Frontispiece in February 2020. ‘It now has pride of place in my loo.’ Leaning against a stone wall in tartan skirt, quilted jacket and headscarf, his alter-ego, Claire, looked quite at home in her rural setting. When I meet Sir Grayson at his studio in north London in June, however, he is in work mode, dressed in clay-smeared joggers and a neon-pink T-shirt. The only vestige of Claire is his immaculate set of sky-blue nails, evidence of her attendance at the Royal Academy of Arts Annual Dinner and Summer Exhibition earlier in the week. Yet country Claire is still on his mind, as she is currently being emblazoned on thousands of tins of shortbread in anticipation of his major exhibition ‘Smash Hits’, opening at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh on July 22. ‘I always like lots of merch,’ he explains, as he dissolves into fits of laughter.

Humour has always been at the core of Sir Grayson’s work. His career began to take off in the 1990s with satirical pots, their surfaces covered in photographs, drawings and patterns surrounded by psychosexual texts. Titles such as A design which implies significance (1992) or