‘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.’
Grayson Perry, April 2021

England as seen during Lockdown from Islington, a new print by Grayson Perry made during the second series of Grayson’s Art Club on Channel 4 on the theme of travel. It started off with the idea of an artist stuck at home, during lockdown, unable to travel and running out of material; so instead of paper the map is drawn on curtains with a rose motif. It is a highly personal view of England from Perry’s vantage point in Islington, North London. 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. Drawn from memory, it is ‘not a map of exact geography’ but rather ‘a vague image of England and what it looks like’.