In the early 1980s Grayson Perry couldn’t afford studio space as a student in Portsmouth, or subsequently at the London squats he lived in, so most of his coming of age as an artist is contained in his sketchbooks. Some of those densely worked pages are reproduced in this volume; mostly collage fantasies in which the artist explores the ongoing internal drama of his gender and sexuality. The tone of the sketches derives, he says, from the scrapbooks his grandmother had once given him, which he filled with pictures of motorbikes and commandos and fighter planes (Perry’s plan as a boy was to join the army). By his late teens, after he started dressing up in women’s clothes for nights out in Essex – and became estranged from his fractured family as a result – that plan had changed and the obsessive mapping out of new possibilities began.

In one image the artist and a Diana figure appear to be praying for salvation together in a wintry graveyard

In some of the pictures, perverse self-portraits lunge towards cutouts of suburban women in court shoes and buttoned-up tweed coats, the shape of things to come. Perry’s ideas of art, of what he might be capable of, dwelled pointedly in the space between male and female stereotypes, a battle-scarred no man’s land in some imaginings and a dressing-up box in others. Hollow-eyed voyeurs stare across this space, transfixed at catalogue images of flirty women in party dresses. A row of models from a hair salon, beneath a crucified pin-up in a pleated skirt, invests the mystery of shampoo and sets with unattainable desire.

‘Understanding something does not stop it being pretty. Art is such fun’: preliminary sketches for pots. Photograph: © Particular Books, 2016

The ghosts of the two dominant women of that decade – Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana – haunt the edges of these images, locating Perry’s feminine role models between a rock and a soft place. Thatcher giving a stiff-armed salute is pasted alongside one of the artist’s devil-horned dominatrix doodles (you can see whispers of the iron lady too in a blonde Cerne Abbas giant, brandishing her cartoon erection). Meanwhile, shy debutante figures peering out from under fringes are always just a step away from self-flagellation and martyrdom (in one image the artist and a Diana figure appear to be praying for salvation together in a wintry graveyard). Handbags proliferate, the source of mysterious, private power. The great mischievous project of the artist’s own transformation seems at stake, or at least at play in these pictures, always trying on identities for size in a range somewhere between wolfish biker and Little Bo Peep. Claire, his eventual, triumphant, Turner prize-winning alter ego, is in gestation but not quite yet born.

Perry has become a pin-sharp observer of class divisions and territories, a cross-dressing Hogarth of the suburbs

Perry says by way of introduction that it took him 20 years to begin to “perfect the ceramic equivalent of these sketchbook images” but after he set up his first pottery studio in 1986, the sketchbooks abruptly become drawing boards for vases rather than hyper-detailed excursions into his subconscious. Surfaces are sketched out with detailed written instructions; a swan-necked pot gets this note for example: “inlaid landscape backdrop; lonely wankers; white masturbating figures in moonlight” or a sketch of a classical urn has these twin labels: “Madness, dysfunction, sex mad! Alan Measles fighting the forces of Cultural Crassness” (Measles, you will remember, is Perry’s childhood teddy bear hero). Eventually, in some cases, the notes become the decoration itself – so, in the pot called Dealing With Self-Conscious, Picasso Napkin Syndrome, the annotation pre-empts critical reaction: “Seemingly effortless”; “Vitality in visual form”; “desperately individual”; “shit”.

Ritual energy and art-school echoes: a preliminary sketch for The Agony in the Car Park from the series The Vanity of Small Differences. Photograph: © Particular Books, 2016

After Perry has received some of this recognition, the sketchbooks are also a refuge from the hard public grind of being an artist. Some of the pages are filled with fashion designs for clothes and accessories that he eventually commissioned, elaborate tapestry frocks and heart-shaped codpieces and snazzy crash helmets; Claire looking vaguely uncomfortable but doing her best in painted clogs and bodices. Perry says that his interest in sketching was reignited when he started to draw with his daughter, who was born in 1992. They would invent the same kind of private worlds together that had once occupied the artist’s own childhood hours, inventing characters, colouring in their house, car, holidays. One of these drawings later evolved into Perry’s A House for Essex, the estranging roadside shrine of a building, part Hansel and Gretel cottage, part Matisse chapel, which he eventually built with architect Charles Holland.

Perry has become a pin-sharp observer of contemporary class divisions and territories, a cross-dressing Hogarth of the suburbs. The felt pen-and-ink drawings for the series of tapestries called The Vanity of Small Differences have a ritual energy full of art-school echoes that his notes make clear – “abandoned shoes ref to marriage of Arnolfini” he will write, in a tableau that became The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal; or “protest camp in Brueghel-ish style” in The Agony in the Car Park.

He is a proud Royal Academician, though of course he pokes fun at the very idea; he raises funds for the institution’s free art school with etchings and pots that aim to get their retaliation in first. The Island of Bad Art is one of the former, an imaginary sketch-map of all those neighbourhoods that can so easily trap the unwary artist – “sixth-form politics”, “lack of commitment”, “corny, retro”, “Po-faced”, “fey bollocks”, “resting on laurels” “fear of getting it wrong”. This book is Perry’s very own, lifelong rough guide to successfully avoiding them.

Sketchbooks is published by Particular Books (£40). Click here to order a copy for £32