Grayson Perry’s tapestries, vases and intricate drawings rarely reach monumental scales, and aside from his architectural House for Essex, he doesn't often unveil permanent public art projects.
Perry’s first public artwork in London, Inspiration Lives Here, 2022, welcomes visitors to the concrete complex at A House for Artists, illuminating the entrance passage in a lamp-come-monument.
A House for Artists is an artists’ living space commissioned by Create London and completed in 2021, providing flexible dwellings for 12 creatives and their families. Its concrete structure is made up of cubic and triangular forms and holds both public- and private-facing utilities. Its diverse housing model – designed by London-based architecture studio Apparata – has room for public arts programmes, studio spaces and indoor and outdoor communal living spaces, imagined for parties and co-working.
Grayson Perry: Inspiration Lives Here
Detail of Inspiration Lives Here by Grayson Perry, commissioned by Create London
Contextualised by the communal space, Perry created the sculpture as an ode to social housing and, commissioned by Create London and funded by Art Fund, it is an emblem of the expanding arts programme in Barking & Dagenham. Referencing the history of the nearby Becontree Estate as a home to wartime heroes and workers from the local Ford factory, the lamp’s light spills from the windows of a house onto a Ford car and Transit van and (made from hand-painted Corten steel) is designed to visibly weather over time.
On the shifting narrative surrounding art in the London borough, Marie Bak Mortensen, director of Create London explains that the project ‘continues our mission to dissolve traditional hierarchies between the art world and the everyday, bringing first-class art to areas where it is least expected’.
Detail of Inspiration Lives Here by Grayson Perry, commissioned by Create London
Inspiration Lives Here by Grayson Perry, commissioned by Create London
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