Mr and Mrs Perry; Mrs Perry

Grayson Perry is one of Britain's foremost contemporary artists. His primary medium is pottery, with drawn, incised and transfer-printed decoration. His imagery is a potent combination of contemporary urban themes, often autobiographical, with social and political critiques, but often represented in the idiom of historic ceramic design or with historic decorative styles and motifs.

This pair of prints was made for his exhibition The Charms of Lincolnshire at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 2006 (first shown at The Collection, the new museum of art and archaeology in Lincolnshire). For this show Perry selected historic artefacts - everything from toys, costume and bibles to game-keepers' traps, coffin plates and a wooden hearse, from various museums of rural life and social history in Lincolnshire. These were shown in conjunction with his own works - including dolls, vases, plates, and an embroidered sampler, all of which were designed to blend together in what was described as "a three-dimensional narrative poem" exploring death, childhood, religion, folk art, hunting and the feminine (a theme of particular interest to Perry, who is a transvestite).

The portrait prints were inspired by the pictures made by amateur or jobbing artists in the 19th century before photographic portraits had become commonplace. Perry has imitated the naive style of these artists, using the cheap and relatively crude medium of lino-cut on commercially printed patterned papers, so that the background appears to be wallpaper. Each pair of prints has a different combination of patterned papers so each pair in the edition is thus unique. Though they purport to be pictures of his ancestors, both figures are clearly based on the artist himself.