Grayson Perry’s Piggy Bank (2017–2022) is a ceramic work that continues the artist’s long-standing engagement with material culture, class identity, and political satire. Rendered in a traditional blue-and-white ceramic style that recalls English Delftware and decorative pottery, the pig-shaped bank is both a nostalgic household object and a vehicle for sharp social commentary.

Across its surface, Perry inscribes labels such as Right, US, Poor, Male, White, Rural, Old, and Fear, directly addressing the socio-political demographics often associated with contemporary populist movements. By carving these identities into a piggy bank—a symbol of saving, value, and economic precarity—Perry highlights how political identity and cultural belonging are commodified, collected, and stored like currency. The bank becomes a metaphor for the ways societies assign value not only to money, but to ideologies and identities themselves.

The use of the pig form carries multiple associations: it is playful and domestic, a childhood memory of saving pocket change, yet also invokes greed, consumption, and the caricature of “pigs” as figures of excess. This duality of innocence and critique is central to Perry’s practice, where familiar craft objects are reworked to reveal uncomfortable truths about contemporary culture.

Executed in ceramic, a medium deeply tied to Perry’s artistic identity, the Piggy Bank blurs boundaries between fine art and folk tradition. The meticulous decoration and stylized patterns draw the viewer in aesthetically, while the inscribed words provoke reflection and unease. Much like Perry’s earlier vases and tapestries, the work embeds cultural critique within everyday forms, ensuring accessibility without diminishing intellectual depth.

By transforming a humble object into a politically charged artwork, Perry makes visible the fractures of class, race, gender, and ideology that underpin Western societies in the early 21st century. The Piggy Bank is thus both satirical artifact and cultural document, encapsulating Perry’s ability to turn the decorative into the critical, and the ordinary into the extraordinary.