England as seen from Lockdown in Islington

England as seen from Lockdown in Islington is a new print by Grayson Perry made during the second series of Grayson’s Art Club on Channel 4 on the theme of travel. The concept is rooted in creative ingenuity during the pandemic, working from intimate found material discovered in the home. Restricted by travel and running out of paper, Perry draws his map on curtains with a rose motif, emblematising a kind of Britishness. Islington, the artist’s home, is the epicentre of the composition, symbolised by Perry’s eyeball, and surrounded by the highest density of names of cultural figures that have influenced him. A highly personal topography, it is “not a map of exact geography”  but rather a “vague image of England and what it looks like.”

Perry describes how “When I was working on this, I was thinking about how we were all travelling in our imaginations. I’ve put the background of floral material in the background there. So very English. It evokes an idea of England, but a kind of trapped, slightly stifling suburban idea of England.”