My taxing role as the Queen Mum

Controversial British artist Grayson Perry, is showing his 'Mixed-up Childhood' exhibition at Auckland's New Gallery. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Grayson Perry gripes after about 20 minutes: "The fact I dress up isn't part of my art, which you haven't asked me about at all yet, which I find quite curious." I had, actually. So he obviously wasn't paying attention.

In any case, when you're an artist with an alter ego named Claire who dresses up in frilly, little-girl frocks with petticoats and lacy white ankle socks, you think you'd be used to people not asking about your art.

When I did ask another question about the art it was the wrong one. Upstairs at the New Gallery, on one of Perry's pots is what looks likes a girl wearing a frilly frock and a huge penis. When I say, "why has that child got a huge penis?" Perry says: "Because it's a boy." Silly me.

Perry is a celebrity artist, because all artists who win the Turner Prize become celebrities. He is also a transvestite so this makes him a real publicity catch for galleries where he obligingly turns up as Claire to cut ribbons and make speeches. He likes the dressing up and he likes performing. He says he's a show off but he didn't bother showing off much with me. He said after the interview he talks to media so much that he varies his delivery.

I'm sure he does this so as not to be horribly bored. He seemed bored with me but perhaps that was just the delivery mode du jour. When I accused him of not having paid attention he laughed in his braying way and said he suspected he'd switched on to automatic.

He prefers talking at people, I suspect. He says he likes to give very long, very dense talks and really, he could go on for hours but he doesn't want to annoy people.

He says he's "nice all the time. I'm a slave to it". If you want him to turn up to an event dressed up, he will be nice and will oblige. This is "my raison d'etre, really. I'm rent-a-bouquet".

"I'm like the Queen Mum. The Queen Mother is the role I try to adopt. Be nice to everybody, cut ribbons, then surprise them by having something to say."

Although he likes the attention he doesn't much like the media and although he says "it's stupid to moan about it", he does rather. He regards the media with some contempt. But he does live in the land of the tabloid where one such paper ran a picture of a pot with a picture of his daughter on it with the caption: "Paedophilia".

"That's the kind of thing that sets journalists' pens on fire. I am the boy that made pots about paedophilia and that's a kind of media Chinese whispers." So I suppose you can forgive him for going on about "poison pens".

When I first meet Perry I tell him I was relieved to see that he wasn't dressed up to the nines. "Oh. Why?" Because, I said, a mate asked me yesterday what I was going to wear to meet you and when I said a white shirt, she said "you can't wear that to meet Grayson." There was no point competing, I said.

"Fair enough," he says.

It was supposed to be a joke - but he has an air of having heard it all before.

Still, I bet the Queen Mum would have laughed, if just to be nice.

He gets annoyed when people ask him whether he makes his pots wearing a frock. "People have a set of questions which I have answers ready for. I say, 'well, look, this dress cost over a 1000 and I'm not going to get it muddy."'

He finds the question stupid, but he thinks his answer is funny. "I think people, they see a trannie potter, so they think that's a smart question to ask and that's why it grates on me because they think they're being clever by asking it - but they're not."

He's also just about had enough of being asking whether he prefers to be addressed as Claire or Grayson. In which case, you think, he might want to stop wearing a frock with "Claire" embroidered on the bib.

I wonder whether he thinks he's created a rod for his own back. He has a bit, he says, "but then I am a transvestite and I do enjoy it, you know. And rarely does my impetus and desire not match up with the social obligations.

"I mean, usually I'm glad to dress up ... because I'm so busy now I don't have the time for leisure trannying like I used to."

His biggest fans are middle-aged women who love to coo over Claire. He, in turn, loves to be cooed over, because, "I'm harking back to the kind of cliche of femininity in childhood."

"You know, the girl who is cooed over just for looking delightful, something a boy has never experienced. Boys are ... only cooed over when they kick a football correctly or they get an A in maths. So it's like your only value is for what you do as a man, not for how you look."

In the gallery, while we're looking at the pots, the gallery's publicist, Claudine, is telling me how beautiful Perry looked last night when he opened the "Mixed-Up Childhood" exhibition.

You might not be so inclined to coo over his pots. We in the gallery look at one titled "Interior Conflict" which is intricately decorated with boys dressed as girls - one is wearing a baby's bonnet, sucking a dummy and carrying a doll. The children are being herded by soldiers with bayonets, one is being hacked apart on the ground.

"It'd give you nightmares looking at it," I say. To which he responds crisply: "Well, that's fine. It gave me nightmares."

His childhood in Essex was not pretty. He grew up in a house without books and where the only pictures were "a couple of prints that came free with soap powder". His father moved out and his bully of a stepfather, the milkman - which sounds like a joke but wasn't - moved in. His stepfather is represented in "Interior Conflict" as "the invading Germans".

Perry was a quite isolated kid who spent much time alone in his room playing with his model aeroplanes and, he tells me, masturbating. And dressing up.

He doesn't speak to his mother. He says he has forgiven her but "why would I want to talk to someone who usually just shouts at you?" His relationship with his father "never really got going ... it was damaged beyond repair, I think."

Still, he is "very happy now. I don't do depression any more".

Winning the Turner might do that to a bloke. He gets invited to all sorts of parties. He's a drawcard - "Oh, we'll have a nice, eccentric artist" - in his pretty dresses and he revels in it. "That's my duty as the Queen Mother. To put on a good hat, you know." What a shame about all those impertinent questions.