Posted on Wednesday 29th August 2012
Grayson Perry with his pot 'What Things Say About Us' at Leeds Art Gallery. Picture by Bruce Rollinson, courtesy of Yorkshire Post Newspapers
Tickets sold like hot cakes and there was standing room only when transvestite potter and Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry provided the highlight of our first lecture season with his talk Taste, Class and Art at Leeds Art Gallery.
Dressed as his alter-ego Claire, he picked up on the themes explored in his three-part television series on Channel 4 which had concluded the previous week, in which he produced six massive tapestries representing Britain's class tribes.
An unflinching and very humorous public speaker, he talked of his student days at Portsmouth Polytechnic where he was teased by his friends for taking evening classes in pottery. He was astute enough to realise that to be successful you have to be noticed and pottery, unfashionable at the time, was his way of standing out from the crowd. His richly-textured, multi-layered and multi-fired pots, commenting on societyin general and class in particular, made his name.