Despite being in rural Essex, Perry’s works predominantly reflect on urban and social themes. This exhibition instead asked Perry to go back to the countryside. The result of this artistic meditation, unexpectedly, is not an historical exhibition about Lincolnshire, nor an idyllic representation of the British rural landscape, as the title of the show initially seems to suggest. Instead, the show reflects on the Victorian era and on themes such as death, childhood, religion, folk art and the feminine. Rather than offering a peaceful and quaint view of the British landscape, one that has been repeatedly appreciated by artists such as William Blake, J. M. W. Turner or L. S. Lowry, Perry unsettled the viewer’s expectations by portraying the raw reality of the Victorian town life. Perry’s curatorial work seeks to expose the social injustices of the time, in tune with the artist’s socially and politically informed practice: "The biscuit tin idyll of cosy village Britain is luckily in the past, for it was a candlelit back-breaking, sexist, tubercular child-death hell. The ghosts of long-ago children flicker in the dead-eyed familiars of wax, porcelain and wooden dolls I have chosen and in the stitches of the samplers worked by young pious hands”. The show included historical artefacts that Perry selected from the Lincolnshire Museum together with a new array of works made exclusively for the exhibition. Together with the lack of verbal descriptions, the exhibition read in Perry’s own words as a “poem without words” which evoked the constrictions and difficulties to which women and children in the Victorian era were subjected: "My initial idea was to focus these themes around an unknown artist, a mentally ill (Victorian) farmer's wife driven insane by the loss of her children. Her ghost and those of the children haunt the choices and works I have made for the show.”
Mr And Mrs Perry, one of the works made specifically in response to the historical artefacts that the artist chose, can be thought of as sketch portraits, typical of the amateur artists working in the 19th century before the advent of photography. The daunting and uncanny characters, which are based on Perry and his wife, Philippa Perry, but represent Perry’s ancestors, are reminiscent of Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic in their severe seriousness and hieratic posture. They also evoke the first commemorative photographs, a photographic tradition that spread in the mid 19th century in Victorian England to immortalise loved ones who had recently died. Uncanny and eerie, the works produced for this exhibition attest to Perry’s own sensibility and offer an intimate look at the artist’s historical reflections.
