The ‘transvestite potter from Essex’

Ariane Bankes talks to Grayson Perry about his work and the judging of the Koestler Awards

The day I met him at the Koestler Art Centre at HMP Wormwood Scrubs he was in mufti, baggy jersey and jeans, with his sleeves metaphorically rolled up to make the final choices for Insider Art, the exhibition of prison art he has co-curated for the ICA. As a transvestite and a bit of an outsider himself, he has always been interested in art from the margins, so this was right up his street. Now he found himself wandering through room upon room of paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics, hung hugger-mugger for the judging process — thousands of submissions from prisons all over the UK to the annual Koestler Awards. How did they strike him? I wondered. ‘It’s like taking a tour through the collective subconscious,’ he said. ‘Here are the concerns, hopes and obsessions of thousands of people — and they’re not much different from our own, of course. There’s a lot of beauty here, and on the whole it’s unmediated by a screen of intellectualising and art history. It’s raw and all the more powerful for that.’ He pointed out that it was like watching an individual’s artistic development: the art from the Special Hospitals often had the brilliant spontaneity and innocence of childhood, that from Young Offender institutions was groping for maturity, while that from the high-security institutions, where inmates serve out longer sentences, might bear multiple layers of irony and sophistication.

And his criteria for choice? ‘It’s intuitive, of course. Beauty is at the heart of it — what I find beautiful — but there’s also the funny, quirky incongruous art, and there’s the powerfully expressive, and there’s the “it’s-so-bad-it’s-good” contingent — there’s a lot of that!’ So we went round together, looking at his choices. ‘Art is rather like handwriting,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s a physicality in the making of it that those who use studio assistants miss out on. You’re very conscious of that physicality here, in the rhythmic, almost obsessive detailing of some of the work. And composition and colour lie at the heart of authentic talent — you can’t fake that. Collectively, it’s an anthropology of what goes on in prison.’