Making Peace: Hold Your Beliefs Lightly

British artist Grayson Perry’s 2011 cotton and silk embroidery has a clear edict, spelled out for us at the bottom of the work: Hold Your Beliefs Lightly. 

But why? 

Our values and beliefs are what ground our sense of identity and tie us to family, friends, larger communities, and perhaps even our nations. What’s the point of loosening our grip on these core aspects of our personhood, that may provide our lives with meaning and connection?   

I think the answer can be found within the artwork itself. The central golden-yellow figure, the artist’s childhood teddy bear named Alan Measles, spreads his arms wide, seeming to both present the titular mantra to us while also sheltering the people and animals at the bottom of the composition. These people all have different kinds of clothing, religious affiliation, and skin color (including bright pink, conspicuously). National identity and religion coalesce around Alan Measles, whose outsized body, crown, sword, and medal all radiate a sense of strength and protection. Alan is a recurring character in Perry’s works, and he often takes the form of a paternal protector figure. 

The work is not admonishing having religious beliefs, or celebrating national pride, or being proud of one’s own culture. Quite the opposite—a woman in a bright sari proudly waves a flag while a woman in a hijab and a red polka dot garment waves affectionately to her— the characters’ diversity drives the action of the artwork. What Alan Measles does command, though, is for us to accept it all.

This can be hard, of course. It’s easy to talk about but often hard to implement in real life. It is human nature to be most comfortable around those who speak and look like us, and who share our behaviors and customs. But if our identities are so rigid that we can’t listen to or genuinely try to understand the beliefs of others, is there really any room for dialogue and growth? The figures gathered beneath Alan Measles’ arms might not share a language or a religious faith, but they do share a willingness to be in the same composition together. 

Grayson Perry created Alan Measles as a child to cope with his difficult upbringing. In some ways Alan is the father figure the artist never had but desperately needed, an inner protector conjured from imagination and manifested in artistic form. Psychologists who study the mind’s response to stress have observed that it is common to develop internal protective figures like this. They are parts of ourselves that step in when we feel unsafe, and that transmit strength on our behalf when we feel powerless and threatened. Perry made his visible, stitched him in bright gold thread, and crowned him. He is strong, but compassionate. Proud, yet humble in his nudity.

I do wonder if we are also supposed to project ourselves onto Alan Measles. “Hold Your Beliefs Lightly” is not suggesting that we give up our beliefs; it is an active call to widen those beliefs so that they might bolster not only our own strength but that of everyone around us.

To hear more on this subject, we invite you to listen to our Self Leadership and Peacemaking discussion with Hugh O’Doherty, MA, MEd, EdD, and Les Fagen, MA, JD. Together they explore legacy traumas and methods of nonviolent mediation and cooperation with the perceived enemy, drawing on the divisions in Northern Ireland and the conflict between Palestine and Israel.