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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.’
He is currently fascinated by how exhibitions can reveal the archaeology or anthropology of lives, indeed minds; how, like psychotherapy, they can map the human psyche. ‘Of course, in putting this into the ICA we are being artists ourselves: the ICA is the frame, and we decide what to put inside it.’ He has a long association with the ICA — that was where he first saw the sculptures of Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, and his own first exhibit was a sculpture he submitted to the New Contemporaries show there in 1980. He was amazed to be accepted then; now he jokes about being ‘Rent-an-Artist’, such an art celebrity has he become. He makes no bones about enjoying it: ‘The art world is a country,’ he says. ‘Are you going to live there, and engage with it, and learn the language, or are you just going to drop in and out, like a tourist? The latter doesn’t work.’ He’s certainly moved in for good: it suits him — ‘Only the arts would tolerate a transvestite potter from Essex,’ he quips — and he’s full of plans for the future. For him the work on the walls of the Koestler Centre has intrinsic value, but like the artefacts he found in the museums around Lincoln and forged into his last curated show at Victoria Miro, The Charms of Lincolnshire, it’s also grist to his creative mill. Will his own work be changed by this? I wonder. ‘It might be,’ he grins; ‘it’s too early to say.’
He has a keen eye for the original, authentic, witty, touching — the very qualities I found in his own disarmingly frank memoir, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. Which brings me on to the subject of Claire, born of a complex of emotions around a childhood which he wryly described on Desert Island Discs as ‘pretty normal, really — divorce, a bit of domestic violence, some low-level mental abuse…’ but which nevertheless left its scars. Claire, too, has taken the art world by storm: six foot plus of radical chic, sometimes topped off with a pair of rabbit ears on a headband, and very good legs. Anyway, I wanted to know: what did he/she wear to meet the Queen? And what’s the royal protocol with rabbit ears — do they count as a hat, and, if not, does it matter? The answer is, Claire wore a short green dress and no ears, and the Queen clearly took a couple of moments to place her, after which she was all charm, of course.
Grayson has little time to be a ‘leisure tranny’ now — life’s just too busy — but with all the events he’s invited to he gets to dress up ‘three or four nights on the trot’ every week. He still designs most of his dresses himself, though the design course he teaches at Central St Martins provides him with several more each year. ‘I generally have a new one on the go,’ he says, and they’re spectacular — beautifully embroidered or appliquéd with Grayson motifs: a collection of his dresses alone would make a stunning exhibition. When I ask him if he ever wears the same one twice he laughs his infectious, down-to-earth laugh, ‘I should say so — I’d never have enough to go round. And I don’t keep a dress diary like some of the celebs — at least not yet.’ From the little-girl frocks of the early days they’re now getting bolder, more fetishistic, more revealing: it’s anybody’s guess what he will wear to open Insider Art on 11 July — which also happens to be his daughter’s 15th birthday.
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