Red Carpet

by Grayson Perry, 2017

Tapestry.
Edition of 8. Accompanied by a signed and numbered certificate.
252.5 x 247 cm (99 3/8 x 97 1/4 in).

  • Red Carpet

For my exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 2017, I wanted to make a work about the immigrant situation. A red carpet evokes the most formal and reverent of welcomes but this piece also references in its style Afghan war rugs. It's a map of Britain as a kind of walled fortress. John Lanchester wrote a novel called The Wall a couple of years after i made this, riffing on the same idea; it was a prescient motif. My inspiration was a map from the early 1800s showing the fortified city of Ranthambhor in northern India, which I found in a book about maps. It had these wonderful rocks around the edge, which I wanted to replicate.


This is Britain distorted: emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, just as Brexit has showed. The distortions partly reflect the density of the population. It's a portrait of Britain in the social-media age, littered with words and buzz phrases that typified public discourse at the time: things like 'dogging spot', 'obesity epidemic', 'revenge porn', 'zero hours contract', 'visitor attraction', 'non-doms', 'postcode lottery', 'scripted reality'. There was a lot in the news about migrants coming in on lorries, so I've got lorries crossing the Channel with little people in them. The background weave is made from photographs of tower blocks, which became scarily potent as an imager after the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in London, which happened just a few weeks after this piece was made.

Grayson Perry

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