Grayson Perry’s new documentary series Rites of Passage airs next week on Channel 4

British viewers are in for a treat next week when Channel 4 broadcasts the first in a brand new four-part series presented and devised by one of the nation’s most loved artists, Grayson Perry.

In Rites of Passage, Grayson will explore the landmark events that mark each and every one of us. The charismatic ceramicist is set to put birth, coming of age, marriage and death under a contemporary, and secular, microscope, in an attempt to explore how ceremony shapes our lives.

Travelling between Indonesia to the Amazon, via Japan and the UK, the show examines, Channel 4 says how the rituals shaped by religion, “don’t always fit with the way we actually live our lives,” here in the modern Britain of, “divorce, blended families, and gay marriage.”

As he did in previous Channel 4 outings like 2014’s Who Are You? and 2016’s Grayson Perry: All Man, the artist will thread his anthropological findings into brand new artworks.

Described as his “most ambitious series” yet, the opening episode will air on the 23 August. The focus will be on death and will see Grayson exploring Indonesian funeral rites, and grief, memory, and loss in Middlesborough.