Photo Credit: Grayson Perry © Richard Ansett, shot exclusively for the Wallace Collection, London

This conversation took place in Perry’s studio in 2025, shortly before the opening of ‘Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur’ at the Wallace Collection. The exhibition features over 40 new pieces by Perry, including ceramics, tapestries, and works on paper, making it the museum’s largest contemporary show to date.  

The exhibition, presented in dialogue with the museum’s permanent collection and works by Madge Gill, was significantly shaped by the discovery of Gill’s participation in Lady Churchill’s ‘Artists Aid Russia’ exhibition at the Wallace in 1942. Perry’s exploration of ‘outsider art’, featuring Madge Gill and Aloïse Corbaz, along with his own childhood experiences, were central to the development of this landmark show.  

These factors sparked the creation of Shirley Smith, an imagined outsider artist who had her own unique connection to the Wallace Collection. 

SD: How do you build up these imaginary worlds? Where did you start? 
   
GP: Certain things come out of my family’s history, like I remember making the bed with my mother when I was about 13, and she had a fucking bill hook under her pillow... she said it was there in case the old man kicks off. I didn’t know if it was my mum camping it up or not, because he was violent, you know. His grandfather killed himself because he was so violent, and he beat up his wife really badly.  

Then I knew that my grandfather, on my mother’s side, had also been a right, violent bastard. So there was that feeling that the patriarchs in the family were right bastards. You know, that old bruised knuckles, old asshole... and so that sort of fed into it.  

SD: You’ve talked before about ‘art being medicine for our deeper selves’. Do you find when you’re making, that it’s a form of therapy? Looking at Gill’s work, do you see that it could have served a similar function for her?  

GP: Oh, yeah, totally, because it has a meditative quality to it. I see in outsider art that kind of self-soothing. There’s lots of repetition when you’re looking at Madge’s embroideries, it’s just endless pattern. That is a very common thing when you look at a lot of outsider art, it looks like they’ve started in the corner and just worked their way across. As an artist, that informs me, because I like drawing like that. But I’m also so self-conscious quite often, because there’s going to be a big tapestry that’s going to cost x amount to make, and you freeze.  

When I did the first of my maps, I literally started in the corner, worked my way across. I think it’s still the one that resonates with people the most, because I didn’t know where it was going but 3-4 weeks later, I reached the other corner. And the style changed in that time. I know where I started and I can see myself fumbling for the style. I think there’s an authenticity to that, I think that’s quite outsider art right, through that obsession, they can churn out variations. I think what they want is to feel as good doing this painting as they did when they did that painting.  

SD: Once Gill referred to her spirit guide as ‘Myrninerest Mere’, using the French word for mother, there’s a sense she felt cared for by this unseen force. Art seemed to help Madge Gill process life’s events, do you relate to this feeling?  

GP: Yeah I do, I’ve always regarded the place I go to in my head when I’m making as a kind of sanctuary. I think a lot of artists must feel that. It’s not me engaging with a kind of smoke-filled room of intellectuals, it’s me retreating into somewhere where I can have a really nice time and don’t have to worry about the world too much for a while.  

SD: When did you first encounter Outsider Art?  
 
GP: I think it must have been the Outsider Show at the Hayward Gallery in 1979, while I was on my foundation course. I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen anything like this before’, and I loved all the details, a lot of the work is very detailed and also quite spooky. The show really struck me. So after, I really looked out for outsider art and tried to see it whenever it was being exhibited, to learn more and more about it. Then when I got a big enough motorbike to go touring on, my wife and I drove down to Lausanne and visited the outsider museum there.  

I’ve never been that influenced by contemporary art. All the things that I’m interested in are outside of contemporary art. Obviously, ceramics, but also general antiquities, material culture, traditional material folk art, whatever.  

SD: What is it that inspires you from this kind of work?  
 
GP: I’ll stumble on something that I hadn’t seen before. A new technique can really inspire you. I get very excited when a new technique comes along, like AI or a certain combination of pottery techniques or tapestry or whatever. It gives you a vocabulary, it’s like getting a new set of words that you can tell stories with. 

SD: What led to the decision to include Madge Gill’s textiles in this exhibition?  
 
GP: I wanted to make that connection, because there is a lot of embroidery in this show; a bed spread, the embroidery I did of the painting, the tapestries and the dress as well. I think it’s a gendered thing, and my kind of shying away from the sort of middle-class machismo of a lot of modern art.  

When I started pottery, it was small, it was craft, you know, and it was gendered feminine... it still is to a certain extent. And textiles, likewise, the domesticity of it was something that appealed to me. So in this show, there is a section that is like a domestic space, so there’s a kind of ‘up yours’ anti-grandiosity vibe going on.  

SD: This is why I think it's great that you’re showing Gill’s embroideries, especially the hat that hasn't been exhibited anywhere before. She was making at a time when embroideries were seen as housewives’ work. There’s evidence that when she’d go to hang her work, the galleries would leave her textiles in a pile on the floor, and only exhibit her drawings, as that was what was accepted at the time. 

GP: Up until the 1980s art was incredibly prescriptive about what was art. It was sort of like, yeah, Duchamp said, anything can be art, whatever. But there was still a set agenda that was going on and you were an abstract expressionist, and then you were a hard-edged abstract expressionist and then you were a pop artist and blah blah blah… And now we live, thankfully, in an art zone where anybody can do anything, and if they’re good enough at it and consistent enough at it they can make it as an artist. I've seen in art fairs, for instance, textile art gradually become more common. 

SD: I see her textiles as quite sculptural. She sat making them on her lap, stitching and stitching to a point the embroidery would warp. They have that sense of ‘horror vacui’, a feeling that every inch needs to be filled. With a lot of her embroideries she left a lot of the threads untied and loose, overflowing at the edges.  

GP: It’s a metaphor, do you think?  

SD: Yeah, I think if she could keep going, and have infinite space she'd just keep going.

GP: Yeah, I think that's what it's about. I think this is a period of time which must have been quite a long period of time—and she filled it. 

SD: Lausanne have a couple of them, and they've got one of the dresses, but it's too fragile, I think, to move anywhere. It was through the research I’ve been doing that I connected with Patricia Beger, who you’re loaning some of the works from. My search for Gill’s embroideries started because I kept returning to the picture of her in her dress and another where she was surrounded by all these tapestries and felt they had to be out there somewhere.  

GP: I wonder if there’s a kind of mystique as well, now, in the age where every single thing is photographed. I think there’s about 10 photographs of me from my childhood, Madge Gill probably had even fewer. So coming from an age, especially if you’re from a working-class background, where there are very few images, you fill it up with your imagination, you lived in a world that was image poor.  

SD: Madge Gill has been labelled as an outsider artist, which is really a term that’s had a lot of debate. 

GP: Yeah, I’m sure it’s been sucked into identity politics. The big attraction of outsider art is that they’re not working with theory, which can be a terrible handicap of being a good artist I think and that can divide. I think it’s not just that the outsider artists are these people who haven’t been to art college and not trained as artists necessarily, but it’s also that the art college and the training of being an artist has gone off on to this sort of stratosphere of intellectual middle-class academia.  

Outsider artists often sort of pop up with this vision that is very particular to them, and it has that energy of someone who is trying to get something out of themselves visually that isn’t beholden to the existing culture.  

SD: Do you see outsider art having an impact on contemporary art?  
 
GP: I’m sure I’m not alone in being a fan. Authenticity is a valuable commodity in the internet age, when so much is fake and so much is cliché, that people are looking for that sort of juice, that alternative.  

SD: Gill attributed all her work to Myrninerest, her spirit guide and that perhaps removed her from being the ‘maker’ to some degree. Do you think that could give an extra layer of freedom when creating? For example, with Shirley Smith and other characters you’ve used within your work do you find that helps you create or talk about the difficult things that have happened in your life?  

GP: I mean, certainly having Shirley helped me, to be a bit more free. Madge comes out of that era, post-First World War, where spiritualism was incredibly popular because of people trying to get in contact with all the lost loved ones. It’s part of the culture. She was part of the culture at the time.  

SD: What do you think it is about Gill’s work that stands out? 

GP: Well, it's always consistency and commitment. You know if it’s just 5 works and not 5000, I think that makes a huge difference. Once an artist has a language, then you look for things in their work that are a good example of their language. And then you go, ‘Oh I’ve not seen one like that by that artist before.’ What's interesting is they sort of build their own worlds.  

‘Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur’ is on display at the Wallace Collection until 26th October 2025. 

Madge Gill by Myrninerest edited by Sophie Dutton (Rough Trade Books) is available now from www.roughtradebooks.com