A House For Essex @ Wrabness, Essex
28 Feb 2025 – 3 Mar 2025
Julie's House
By the banks for the Stour Estuary, in Wrabness, rises a house, part wayside chapel, part pilgrimage site. Clad in green and white tiles and roofed in brass, this is no ordinary house; it’s Julie’s house.
Julie, a woman, Essex born (1953 – 2014) lies buried here. Except of course she isn’t, for Julie is a fictitious Essex everywoman from the mind of artist Grayson Perry. With this house, both inside and out, Perry constructs the birth, life and tragic death of his secular saint Julie Cope.
Grayson Perry, the Turner prize winning British artist, famed for his subversive ceramics, tapestries and prints (and baby-doll dressing up) lets his imagination rip to create a world that is part art, part social commentary and 100% bonkers. Framing the narrative and informing all the artwork is the accompanying text ‘The Ballad of Julie Cope’, an important work narrating Julie’s life and giving context to the house and its contents.
A House For Essex
A House For Essex, Lounge Space
In a flooded Canvey Island
Out came Julie’s puplish giblet body
From there a childhood and adolecence spent in Basildon where
Default settings kicked in, roles adopted
No dreams were crushed, children were kind of had.
Divorce from first husband Dave, followed by a move to Maldon where, finding herself
moaning about being bored
A friend says
go to uni
It is there that Rob
forty, plumpish, with all the
Easy graces of the upper middle class
enters her life
She discovered what a man could become
When he’s nothing to prove to other men
A move to Wrabness, via Colchester, it was a love found and cherished and yet a scooter
brakes too late
Strikes Julie wrong and crack! She meets her end
and for Rob to hear the news that she has gone
half of him in her had died
The ballad ends movingly with Rob flicking through old snaps, coming across a photograph of Julie in Agra and recalling their conversation in which he had said that should she die
He would then grieve as deep as Shah Jahan
And build a Taj Mahal upon the Stour
and so
In that moment he knew what to do
Julie’s house is therefore a beacon of Rob’s love for Julie.
Overlooking the lounge space is the large ceramic figure of Julie Cope, the All-Knowing Pagan Goddess. This is her space and we are encouraged to look up to her and admire her.
All–Knowing Pagan Goddess
All–Knowing Pagan Goddess
All–Knowing Pagan Goddess (Detail)
All–Knowing Pagan Goddess (Detail)
The two large tapestries in the lounge area depict both halves of Julie’s life, the first, growing up, marrying Dave and having children, the second, going to university, meeting Rob and getting killed.
Tapestry – A Perfect Couple
Tapestry – In Its Familiarity, Golden
Then there are Perry’s signature ceramic pots too, more tapestries and a ceiling covered in Perry designed wallpaper. However, the most outlandish addition to the lounge area is the moped suspended from the ceiling. The moped being the one that collided with her, bringing her life to its tragic end.
Honda C90 – the take-away delivery bike
It is then that we contemplate the emotions that must have risen in Rob as he was given the news. Standing on the front porch in his bare feet ‘half of him in her had died’
Half of Him in Her had died
The house is an excellent example of an immersive installation built around a specific narrative, in this case Julie’s life. Even the exterior décor of the house depicts, through raised ceramic tiles, her life – A pregnant woman, a nappy pin, the Essex Crest and a cassette tape.
With Perry’s wit and flair, what we get is a unique vision of a life and house that is simultaneously filled with the bizarre, the humourous, the kitsch and tenderness.
A House For Essex