At the June meeting of the Shipston Arts and Crafts Society, Alice Foster spoke on Grayson Perry’s Tapestry, a series of artefacts currently on tour in museums in England.

Grayson Perry conceived the series of six tapestries as a late-twentieth-century version of The Rake’s Progress, the six cartoons by William Hogarth in the eighteenth century. Perry’s tapestries show a young man, Tim Rakewell, moving from a working-class childhood in Sunderland through grammar school and university to success as a computer entrepreneur and ultimately death in a car crash. At university, he meets a nice girl from Surrey, whose family accept him, unlike his own who reject him. He marries her and from his increasing wealth, they move from the modern house with traditional accoutrements to the country pile in the Cotswolds but he abandons her for a younger trophy wife who survives the car crash.

Throughout the talk, Alice Foster related the symbolism of the tapestries to much earlier paintings and brought out continuing aspects of the objects shown in them, not least the mobile phone.

The next meeting will be on Tuesday, July 21 at 7.30pm when Linda Farrar will speak on Late Roman Mosaics at the Catholic Church Parish Centre, Darlingscote Road, Shipston-on-Stour. All are welcome.