ART AND CRAFT

摘要

The estuaries of Essex are endless, absorbent fringes to a defined territory. Out on the salt marshes, in the mud, emerged fragments of Darwin's Beagle, while legions of Second World War concrete pillboxes occupy riverside water meadows, a counterweight to battalions of flimsy beach huts, tenuously secured against the coastal elements. Now comes the near legendary A House for Essex in which Grayson Perry depicts the fictional life of Julie May Cope, born on Canvey Island in 1953 during the fatal floods of that spring and killed in a road accident (with a takeaway curry delivery scooter) in 2014. She's a woman of her (and his) generation, caught between tough reality and the dream gifts of social and intellectual mobility. Perry's young Julie is of the 'New Town' era (Basildon, South Woodham Ferrers), the older Julie a mature student of a 'New University' (Essex, in Colchester). Two lives, two marriages, two views. This is her house. In a strange way she was the client.