RAMM: Aspects of Myself, Grayson Perry

This exhibition closes on the 3rd May 2026

This is a ticketed exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.  I brought my ticket online the day before which gave me 25% off but people were still buying tickets on the day.  You can get tickets from the reception by the garden entrance on the first floor.  I would probably book in advance if I was going on a weekend though as even on a weekday, it was pretty busy.

The exhibition is in gallery 21.  From the garden entrance reception area, you go past the lifts and then turn right at the giraffe.  The entrance to the gallery is in Finders Keepers?, gallery 11 and is identified by two red ropes either side through a double automatic door.  There is a partition wall immediately in front of you as you enter, but otherwise, the room is open.

There are actually not very many pieces to look at, but the pieces there are, are huge!  The main part of the exhibition is the Ballad of Julie Cope and these tapestried included are so detailed and full.  Julie is a fictional character whose life reflects the lives of all of us, especially women of the same generation as Julie, the Baby Boomers.  

Julie was born during the floods of 1953 on Canvey Island, which were a devastating event locally.  A low pressure caused especially high tides that inundated the land around.  307 people died in England and 19 in Scotland with pver 160,000 acres flooded and 30,000 people evacuated.  As bad as it was in the UK, in the Netherlands, 1836 people died.  As bad as this event was, it is now only living memory to the older generation.

So Julie was born in an attic, delivered by her father.  Her mother nearly died and never wanted to have more children following this.  The next day they were rescued by boat and removed roof tile from inside the loft to escape.

The family moves to Basildon and her father works on the Ford production line.  Her mother was an unhappy person, often angry.  Her childhood consisted of being good, keeping clean and quiet.  She was very clever but this as never encouraged and she became a typist.  She met a man called Dave, who seemed a bit different from the others.  He was a supervisor at the refinery as well as a musician in a band.  His possessive lust bolstered her self-esteem and everyone said they were a perfect match.

The first tapestry shows Julie and Dave as a perfect match front and centre, except she holds a bunch of flowers with a tag saying sorry.  To the left we see Julie's first day as she is in a boat, leaving her flooded birthplace.  To the right we see Julie and Dave before they married, Dave sits in the car and Julie sits on the bonnet.  In the centre they stand as an idyllic family with two children, except Dave is already having affairs.

Dave became more political and although he worked hard to provide for his family, he had an affair with a school teacher.  Julie found a comb in the back of their car and realised it was not the first affair.  They split up.  Julie is sad but pulls her life back together with determination and faces down the other woman at parent teacher consultations.  Dave is pays his way and has the children regularly.  

Julie works part time in Social Services but she has no real qualifications, so does not have much of a career.  She is frustrated and she realises she is becoming angry at her children, like her mother.  She realises and steps back and learns to manage in a different way.  This calmr approach works well at work too.

The children have everything they need and Dave is ok as a co-parent.  As they start to fly the nest, Julie realises she is bored and starts a degree.  She meets Rob, an IT Tech, and they start to date.  An upper middle class divorcee with no kids, he loves her free spirit, while Julie appreciates what a man can turn in to, when he is not trying to prove anything to other men.  

They married and Rob became modestly rich.  They had a good life, with plenty of holidays.  Rob had a heart attack from too much good food and wine.  They re-evaluated their lives but continued to work at a slower pace.  Until Julie was killed, knocked over by a moped rider delivering curry in Colchester.

Some time after an emotional funeral, Rob is looking through old photographs.  He finds one of the pair of them in front of the Taj Mahal.  He had promised her he would grieve as deeply as Shah Jahan and build her a Taj Mahal on the Stour.

The second tapestry in this series is in it's familiarity, golden.  In the centre are an older Julie and Rob, looking content and middle class.  To the left is Julie with the children, waving at a Dave who has come to visit the children.  To the right, Julie lies dead, with the moped and then the rider looking traumatised.

As part of this body of work, Grayson created A House for Essex, which is Rob's tribute to Julie.  The house sits near Wrabness and you can book it to stay in.  Otherwise, you can only see the outside.  The house is a highly detailed tribute to Julie's life.  Maybe some day, I will get to visit it.  There is a documentary called Grayson Perry's Dream House which was produced by Channel 4.

The originals of the two tapestries showing Julie's life sit inside the House for Essex but there were two further tapestries that sit both in the house and were part of this exhibition.  They both show Rob and Julie, first when they are younger, when they first met, then secondly when they are much older.  It is interesting to see how Julie transforms herself.  She begins as fashionable with carefully curled hair, a wide sun hat and a low cut dress.  Rob has a handlebar moustache, long hair and a brightly coloured 70's suit.  I the second, they are older.  Less fashionable, more prosperous, more comfortable.  Julie has a grey bob and a bunch of wildflowers while Rob is bearded in a jumper with a glass of wine.

I think it's really hard to understand from a picture just how large and detailed these four tapestries are.  Each one takes several months to sketch before being transferred on to the computer over a month or month and a half.  It then take three months to adapt the images for weaving.  The loom then takes four days to thread and then 5 hours to create.  The level of detail is huge.  Julie's hair for instance in the large tapestry of her and a younger Rob, it felt like you could see every individual hair.  You could look at each tapestry and find some new detail every time.

Beyond the tapestries there were six snapshots of Julie with are woodcut prints with lithographic underlays.  They include Julie on a picnic with the children, the picture of Julie in front of the Taj Mahal that inspired A House for Essex, Julie as a girl and Julie as a young woman leaning on her motorbike.  The motorbike is suspended from the double height lounge of A House for Essex.

There are a couple of photographs showing A House for Essex and then a couple of sprig moulds used to make tiles added to the outside of the house.  One is to make a safety pin tile and the other, a cassette tape.  I found these really interesting, imagining how the tiles would look when made using the moulds.  There are around 2000 tiles on the house.

In addition, you can explore the tapestries in more detail using an app on a screen.  I couldn't get near this!  It was popular and absorbing to those using it.  The Ballad of Julie Cope is a 3000 word retelling of Julie's life and there is an audio recording of Grayson reading it with the words on a screen.  There was a display of Grayson's books next to this screen and I found the ballad in one of these.  I found it much easier to read the ballad from a book.

So Julie takes up a huge part of an exhibition titles aspects of myself....  So in some way, she reflects Grayson too.  Grayson is a transvestite whose female alter ego is called Claire.  It isn't much of a leap to see that Claire would relate to the life of Julie as much as any other woman.  It's thought one of the figures stood near a dying Julie might be a representation of Claire.  Grayson says that his identity as a transvestite was formed in childhood.

Grayson also has a cuddly toy from childhood called Alan Measles.  Alan Measles often appears in Grayson's art and he appears in the tapestries as well.  With the help of a Psychotherapist, Grayson realised he projected positive male characteristics that were lacking in his own life on to Alan Measles.  This toy was a benign dictator in Grayson's imaginary world.

Beyond this, there were five other works included in the exhibition.  The first two were imaginary maps created using etching.  These would be considered large pieces by most, but in comparison to many of Grayson's other pieces....  Each features aspects of Grayson broken down into physical features.  For instance a river is labelled Imagination while a street is called Alpha Masculinity.  Grayson has said that these pieces give a lot of detail on himself and they require a lot of close attention to pick up all the small details.  This is certainly true!

There were three ceramic pieces, each was a classic form, there is not much shocking about the shapes, but they are a blank surface for Grayson to work with.  I have no idea how many different processes Grayson uses to create these complicated layered images.  It's not surprising that Grayson is well known as a ceramicist.  The first, is a Mad Kid's Bedroom Wall, the second is How I thought of Myself and the last is Aspects of Myself.  I found these pieces fascinating but it's like my brain was just completely overwhelmed by this point.  I really wanted to be able to walk round each individual piece and absorb the story of each one, but they were presented together in a cabinet.  I could mostly walk round each one but I couldn't fully treat them in a circular way.  It was harder for me to follow the images around and get to grips with each piece.  

So although there were not many pieces in the exhibition, it was incredibly full.  The level of detail in every single one of their pieces is incredible.  It is not possible to take it all in on one visit.  I described Grayson Perry's work to a friend as being a bit like a Hyperactive Fever Dream.  I know when we visited the six tapestry series, the Vanity of Small Differences, at the Box in Plymouth earlier this year, my husband found the works quite overwhelming.  I think it would have to be clear that most of us do not have brain's that function like Grayson's.  I could maybe work with that much information but I couldn't pull it together in to a coherent single image.  There is too much there for my brain to hold together at one time.  They are entire passages of time, further layered with symbolism, both personal and internal to Grayson but also wider societal themes.

I was actually glad the exhibition was limited to one gallery.  Not only would I find too many of his works overwhelming but his popularity makes the spaces themselves overwhelming too.  There were a lot of people, although initially, not as many as at Beryl Cook at the Box.  I don't always find it very easy to focus when there is a lot going on around me.  It's harder to read and retain what I am reading for instance.  I am beginning to think I should start taking headphones with me for exhibitions like this.  I know you can get white noise generators for instance

Part way through the exhibition, a tour group was brought in.  This meant that there was a group of people, many of which had chairs, that then took up space in front of a piece for a talk.  They would spill over and occupy some of the space of neighbouring pieces as well.  I know that every person in those groups had paid very well for the privilege and I do not begrudge them this.  I think I would like the opportunity to know when these tours are going to be so I can avoid them and choose when I am going to go in to the exhibition.  The ceramics were the last thing I looked at and took me closer to the end of the exhibition where the group was.  I think that tuning out so many people makes it very hard for me to then take in what I am looking at.

I actually quite enjoy listening in to tour guides as I often learn interesting things, but in a room where there are lots of other people not part of the tour also talking....  it's just not possible.  At this point, I am trying to tune out everything.

I loved the opportunity to see some of the aspects of a House for Essex.  I am not actually sure I would be able to handle a stay there.  I think it could be quite overwhelming to me in all it's detail.  This was a much more manageable way for me and enables so many more people to see them than can ever stay at the house.