Grayson Perry, Alan Measles and Claire meet Shirley Smith and The Honourable Millicent Wallace, 2024 (detail) [© Grayson Perry Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro]

WHEN Shirley Smith woke up in Manchester Square after a mental breakdown, she became convinced she was someone else. Surrounded by the treasures of the Wallace Collection, she claimed them as her rightful inheritance. She was, after all, the Honourable Millicent Wallace.

Yet Shirley/Millicent began her life not in Hertford House – but in the head of Clerkenwell’s own Sir Grayson Perry. She is just the latest creation of an artist whose work and public personality has laid bare his discomfiture with the norms of class, gender and the high-value art world in which he now moves.

In the caption beside My Home, a loud woodblock print of the 18th century building with Shirley at the front door, Perry describes Hertford House as “a poor person’s dream of how a rich person’s home should look”.

But given this new show is titled Delusions of Grandeur, it seems fitting that it’s ended up not in Hertford House’s palatial halls, but its rather claustrophobic basement.

“That’s pragmatic,” Perry tells me at the press launch. “The initial thought was that I could put the work around the museum, but of course with it being a state-funded museum that’s free, it wouldn’t be behind a paywall, and it wouldn’t make the Wallace Collection any money.”

At which point Wallace Collection director Xavier Bray chips in: “And we need it, we’ve got a big deficit.

“It’s not the best exhibition space, but it’s the only place where we have the stage. We’ve done exhibitions since 2018, we never did exhibitions before.”

Sir Grayson Perry [Richard Ansett shot exclusively for the Wallace Collection, London]

At the centre of the show are a number of Perry’s signature pots, the medium that won him popular and critical acclaim – not to mention the 2003 Turner Prize.

One is titled Alan Measles and Claire meet Shirley Smith and the Hon. Millicent Wallace, showing this exhibition’s continuity with Perry’s previous work – in which the characters of his female alter-ego and childhood teddy bear have long loomed large.

It’s an accomplished design: a fiery sky speaks to red-hot personal drama as well as class conflict; the buildings are detailed and yet destabilised; and the figures pay homage to the “outsider artists” Madge Gill and Aloïse Corbaz, whose work serves as inspiration for Perry across this exhibition.

Yet the image is superimposed upon the ceramics with a surprising air of crassness, which brings home a problem throughout the show.

Although the works are “each made in direct response to the Collection”, they display an astonishing lack of attention to the mediums in which they are embodied.

Even the cakes in the Delusions of Grandeur afternoon tea – yours for £50 per capita – look like they were designed for the canvas, with the result that they taste positively nasty.

In Smash Hits, Perry’s 2023 retrospective at Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy, we saw how the artist had excelled in adopting the tapestry form through a close attention to its material basis – both in terms of texture and storytelling.

In Delusions of Grandeur, with its disappointing absence of textiles, we instead see a single, transferable approach – with seemingly little thought about what makes each medium special.

One exception is found in the most accomplished piece here – which is also the most uncomfortable to look at.

It’s a humanoid figure in a glass case, offering up a surly grimace. He is clutching a small guitar obscured by an overload of coloured beads, but his performance is so far removed from joy that it’s as if the pebbles of his torso are pressing up on your bare feet.

Yet viewed from behind, Man of Stories transforms from passive victim to a Citizen Smith-style caricature of political activism.

The plethora of badges on his cloak include Fans Supporting Foodbanks, F*** the Tories, Hated by the Daily Mail. It’s the essence of the post-2010 anti-austerity movement, at the very moment that government cuts are biting once again under Labour.

Perry demurs. “Even the art world is facing a bit of austerity at the moment, so the background hum is not great, and there is a general cloud of gloom over many things at the moment.

“But I’m not out to solve the world’s problems with a paintbrush.”

Perhaps it’s just as well.

• Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur is at the Wallace Collection until October 26. www.wallacecollection.org