Embroidery

Starting from his first work, Love Plane (2000), which innocently represents a small plane carrying two little hearts on each of its wings, surrounded by an amorphous pattern, Perry’s production continues with his more overtly political and ironic works. Recipe For Humanity (2005) presents a couple dressed in the guise of a Shakespearean comedy. The undertone of the embroidery is sexually explicit, the couple happily dancing around a tree in an idyllic pastoral setting, surrounded by animal life and vegetation. The festive and reveller tone of the image is soon ruined by the pamphlet, which reads as a cynic commentary on the absence of God, followed promptly by a decadent invitation to seek pleasure on Earth, “Impose thy will upon earth’s mess/ Else your life is meaningless/ No hell below no heaven upon / live life now and act with love”.

With Britain Is Best (2014), Perry expresses to the fullest his political engagement. The artist made the embroidery while filming his BBC documentary Who Are You, and recounts seeing a Unionist march in Belfast celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Ulster Volunteer Forces, here represented in the piece. In making an embroidered flag, Perry was attempting to recreate a banner he could see the Unionists wearing in a march, and added that to him there was something farcical about their version of Britain: “a holding-out for an imaginary past golden age, a dour, bowler-hatted, flag-waving postwar Britain”.

Most of Perry’s tapestries were produced on commission from or on the occasion of his shows. For instance, Perry made Hold Your Belief Lightly (2011) for The Tomb Of The Unknown Craftsman, an exhibition held at the British Museum, with whom Perry has collaborated on several projects, as in his Medals series. Gay Black Cats MC was instead released by Perry as a limited edition flat on the occasion of his first solo show for the Serpentine Gallery, entitled The Most Popular Exhibition Ever. The flag depicts two black cats on a motorcycle, driving off defiant of the policeman shouting at them. The piece was inspired by Asafo flags, which were used by Asafo groups to visually represent resistance and defiance to slavery in 18th-century Ghana. Last but not least, his Marriage Flag attests to Perry’s ongoing collaboration with non-profit organisations, having made this flag in support of Koestler Arts, a company aimed at introducing people in the criminal justice system to the arts.

While some embroideries carry messages more political in tone than others, all of the works are a remarkable token of Perry’s ceaseless creativity and work, his engagement with different media and his desire to permeate any material he can find with his satirical, ironic and sarcastic vignettes.

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