I could have gone to Uni, but I did the best I could, considering his father upped and left. He (Tim) was always clever a little boy, he know how to wind me up. My mother liked a drink, my father liked one too. Ex miner a real man, open with his love, and his anger. My Nan though is the salt of the earth, the boy loves her. She spent her whole life looking after others. There are no jobs around here anymore, just the gym and the football. A normal family, a divorce or two, mental illness, addiction, domestic violence… the usual thing… My friends they keep me sane… take me out… listen… a night out of the weekend in town is a precious ritual.’ The Dean views Perry as “a magpie-like figure — taking ideas and imagery from a range of sources — making use of archetypes without simply singling out medieval sacred art”. Nevertheless, the fact that works of sacred art inspired these tapestries, and that tapestry itself is an art-form that the cathedral’s early custodians would have been familiar with, and was used to bring religious stories to life and depict historical events, means that, when the tapestries are shown in this space, these connections and references are activated and animated in ways that wouldn’t otherwise occur. As a result, showing Perry’s tapestries here proves to be an inspired move. The Agony in the Car Park”, 2012. Wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry, 200 X 400 cm. British Council Collection. The Vanity of Small Differences” is at Salisbury Cathedral until 25 September. More information here The tapestries, recently acquired by the Crafts Council, begin their two-year national tour at Banbury Museum (11 March - 13 May 2017).

One of the purposes of liturgy and worship is to look at ourselves in the light of the gospel, making self-reflection a core spiritual discipline. A point that the Dean likes to make to visitors is that, although these tapestries were made ten years ago, they are, after Brexit, the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, and the war in Ukraine, “of more relevance than ever before” in their exploration of how united or divided we are as a nation. There is much more that could be said about Christian belief but enough has been provided with which to explore the thoughts behind ‘The Vanity of Small Differences.’ For a start Perry invites us ‘to come out of hiding’ in terms of our own sense of the group/tribe/class we belong to. These things contribute to our sense of self identity but may also cut us off from other people, preventing us from understanding their way of life and causing us to criticise or despise it. The title of the exhibition is derived, according to Perry, from Freud’s phrase ‘the narcissism of small differences’, ‘alluding to the fact that we often most passionately defend our uniqueness when differentiating ourselves from those who are very nearly the same as us.’ Why, we might wonder, has Perry replaced the word ‘narcissism’ with ‘vanity’ in his title? Narcissism is a form of intense self-regard. Vanity, in this context, might have a double meaning: vanity as a form of self-regard, but vanity also as something futile or empty. These differences don’t matter and we ought to be spending more time contemplating what we have in common. And this might Perhaps unusually for a contemporary artist, I often prioritise how my work might flourish in a domestic setting…' The contemporary comic genre contains many novel and sophisticated artistic expressions. Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning MAUS and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, winner of the 1991 World Fantasy Award for short fiction, could be called fine art storytelling.1 And the comics drawn by Chris Ware in his Acme Novelty Library would find a comfortable home among fine art books.The progress of Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell seems to have been influenced by his miserly father and in the course of his adult life women are simply an appurtenance. In Tim Rakewell’s progress, women are the dominating force, and the chief influence on his personality, and that influence is rarely benign. Why does Perry represent men and women in this way? And why does he do so with what some might interpret as a kind suppressed anger? Grayson Perry writes in the Guardian and reveals two new works ahead of his Serpentine Galleries show

Thus while offering social commentary on class in Britain, Perry is along the way reflecting on secularisation understood as the loss of religious belief as an integrating force in society and giver of meaning on a personal level. Here I sense in his work a self-aware religious nostalgia. There was no golden age of religion, when all held hands in national unity, just as there was no working-class idyll for Tim Rakewell. But there remains a deep religious longing for something which would give the course of our lives more coherence than a night on the town, a day spent surfing online, and the pursuit of wealth and possessions.The Adoration of the Cage Fighters”, 2012. Wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry, 200 X 400 cm. British Council Collection. Some of Claire’s best-known outfits are featured in this display (4 November 2017 – 4 February 2018), including the Bo Peep dress worn when Perry was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003. And again, doesn’t the fact that we live in an apparently mobile society mean that there is, as in Perry’s case, a good deal of movement between classes, and therefore perhaps a confusion about class identity. To what extent are the things which I possess, enjoy, value and seek out, influenced by class or by individual choice? We seem to have here, another version of the free-will debate. In matters of taste and behaviour how much is conditioned by class and how much by free choice? Clearly self-knowledge may be important in resolving such an issue. And as part of the debate might we also challenge Perry’s assumptions about class? He has clearly grown up deeply conscious of class, but is our society moving beyond class as a significant factor in our make up? Finnbarr Webster Adoration of the Cage Fighters (left) and The Agony in the Car Park, hung beneath cathedral windows