Writing about Black Dog, Grayson Perry says, ‘Black Dog is the name Winston Churchill used for his depressions. This piece is about the roots of depression: emotional trauma and turmoil. Some of the drawn scenes are from my childhood. One of them is an autobiographical incident that I jokingly referred to because there was a dog involved. I was dressing up in the grounds of an abandoned Victorian mansion up the road on a summer’s afternoon. All of a sudden I heard voices, so I quickly retreated into a little summer house and hid. There were people wandering about the grounds and they had a dog with them that came bounding in. I was terrified of being discovered, so I was desperately saying, “Go away, get away, get out of here!” The dog was sniffing around, and here I was cowering in the corner of a summer house in a badly fitting dress and some slingbacks.

The drawn images also show a boy in a dress with an authority figure and a girl pointing at him. I put the photographs in as a contrast: biker babes, Princess Diana, Blackpool, the Madonna of the Meadow. They’re all gender stereotypes being played out. It’s about emotional, as much as physical, contrast.

I suffered from depressions myself before having therapy. I used to have really down periods for a couple of days, if not longer.’

Born in Chelmsford, Essex in 1960, Grayson Perry lives and works in London. Winner of the 2003 Turner Prize, he has exhibited in museums worldwide. Major institutional exhibitions in 2020 include The Pre-Therapy Years at The Holburne Museum, Bath, UK (on view until 3 January 2021), the first exhibition to survey works made by the artist between 1982 and 1994. Institutional venues for other recent national and international solo exhibitions include the Monnaie de Paris; Kiasma, Helsinki; The Serpentine Galleries, London; Arnolfini, Bristol; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Perry has also curated several major exhibitions, most recently the critically acclaimed 250th Summer Exhibition at London’s Royal Academy and The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum, London.