Wikipedia: Perry started pottery lessons in September 1983 at the Central Institute where he was taught by Sarah Sanderson. His first exhibition of ceramics was in London in December 1983. He began to develop images and text that represented his experience in terms of "explicit scenes of sexual perversion – sadomasochism, bondage, transvestism".[11] For a while he made glazed plates with text because he could not make anything else. He was never motivated by a desire to work in clay as such, rather he chose pottery because studio ceramics was in "thrall to a formal idea". Film having proved an inadequate medium for communicating his ideas about gender and society, Perry found in pottery an effective alternative because of "the ways artifice could be deployed to make the innocent or honest pot have a purpose and mean something".

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam mounted a solo exhibition of his work in 2002. It was partly for this work that he was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003, the first time it was given to a ceramic artist.