Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing CBE, RA (born 10 December 1963) is an English conceptual artist, one of the Young British Artists, and winner of the 1997 Turner Prize. In 2007 Wearing was elected as lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Early life

Wearing was born in 1963 in Birmingham, England. She attended Dartmouth High School in Great Barr, Sandwell. She moved to Chelsea, London to study art at the Chelsea School of Art and squatted in Oval Mansions. In 1987 she attained a bachelor of technology degree in art and design and in 1990 she attained a BFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. John Slyce has described Wearing's method of representation as "frame[ing] herself as she frames the other". Her work in photography and video at first appear like most other journalistic methods of documentation seen in television and documentaries, but after further examination it becomes apparent that they do not conform to mass-media conventions.

In the early 1990s, Wearing began putting together photography exhibitions where she worked with strangers. There is a recurring pattern in her work where she plays and mocks the idea of the artist as anthropologist, but her anthropological activities do not focus on discovering a foreign culture but instead challenges what we thought we already knew. As John Slyce puts it: "Gillian Wearing does not suffer the indignity of speaking for others.". How Wearing approaches her subjects then is by inviting the individual to include their own articulation of thought into the picture within the space that she has provided, rather than an objective documentation.

Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–1993)

In her piece Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–1993), Wearing conducted a series of portraits wherein she approached strangers that she encountered on the street, and asked them to write what they were thinking about on a placard. Wearing stated that "When they returned with something they had written, it challenged [her] own perception of them". Through this exercise, people of different backgrounds, religions, ages and social statuses become unified through the art practise as "all of a sudden you have to start re-appraising people."

Mask

In Russell Ferguson's "Show Your Emotions" he draws Wearing's use of mask draws to an older tradition that runs back to at least as far as classical Greek tragedy: "One in which the mask functions not so much to substitute one identity for another as to obliterate the superficial aspects of physical appearance in order to reveal more fundamental truths". In Confess all on video. Don't worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian (1994) is a 30-minute long video where Wearing recruited strangers through posting an ad in Time out magazine and provided a space where participants would confess their terrors and fantasies to the camera, their identity protected by costume masks. The mask is a reoccurring device in Wearing's work and it functions as protection as well as an apparatus that empowers the wearer; by making their identities anonymous it allows them to express their identity without constraint. But that's not the case, it might be that they have been reciting the trauma that they have experienced in their heads over many years. This piece materialized after Wearing caught a glimpse of a woman she saw with a bandaged head while in her friend's car. She created masks out of silicone of her mother, her father, her sister, her uncle, and a mask of herself with help from experts that were trained at Madam Tussauds in London. Wearing used a fixed camera and the length of the pose was long in duration, which resulted in an awkward personal moment. The individuality of each member begins to assert itself as the recording goes on and the officers conclusively become "ordinary human beings". Of these "confessional" pieces, Wearing stated, In 1994, Wearing created the provocative film "Dancing in Peckham", where she recorded herself dancing in a busy South London shopping centre capturing the reactions of passers-by to explore the gap between public and private experience.

One of Wearing's first UK shows was held at the Chisenhale Gallery in east London, in June 1997.

In 1997, Wearing won the Turner Prize and exhibited videos such as 60 minutes silence which is a video of 26 uniformed police officers, but at first appears to be a photograph. Wearing said, "The piece is about authority, restraint, and control." She also exhibited Sacha and Mum showing emotions between a mother and daughter. Wearing described the piece as, "Things can not be finalized—- as far as emotions are concerned. They're always in turmoil and can go to two polar opposites." Cornelia Parker, Christine Borland and Angela Bulloch were the other shortlisted artists.

In the late 1990s, Wearing made a three-channel video called Drunk (1997-1999), for which she filmed a group of street drinkers who she had got to know outside her studio against the backdrop of a white photographic backdrop. The drinkers are shown in different scenes individually and in groups. They stagger around, fall over, bicker, fight, sleep and in the end one of the men stands against the backdrop and urinates.

2000s

In Wearing's Broad Street (2001), she documents the behavior of typical teenagers in British society who go out at night and drink large amounts of alcohol. Wearing shows teenagers partying at various clubs and bars along Broad Street, Birmingham. Wearing follows these teenagers demonstrating how alcohol contributes to their loss of inhibitions, insecurities, and control.

In 2003, Wearing caused controversy with her cover for The Guardians G2 supplement, consisting solely of the handwritten words "Fuck Cilla Black". The cover illustrated an article by Stuart Jeffries complaining about the cruelty of modern television.

The themes of modern television were further explored in Wearing's project Family History (2006) commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, and accompanied by a publication on the project.

2010s

thumb|A Real Birmingham Family

Wearing's 2010 show People (2005–2011) at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery included work ranging from video, to photographic portraiture, to installation and sculpture. Snapshot (2005) is a series of seven single-projection videos framed by a candy-colored array of plasma screens, each depicting different stages of the female life cycle—from the innocence of early childhood to old age.

Wearing also released her first feature film in this year: Self Made. Film theorist David Deamer writes that the film 'is a paradox. And it is the nature of the paradox that gives the film its power [...] The paradox emerges indirectly, a consequence of the two modes of narration of the film. First mode: documentary. The participants – through their facilitator, Sam Rumbelow – explore the techniques of "the method", method acting, which will allow them to encounter themselves anew and so generate their own "self-made" film. In this way each participant goes on to star in their own short, which, while encompassed by director Gillian Wearing's documentary, appears as its own moment of narration. So, second mode: fiction'.

Wearing was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to art. In the same year, she was among the names in Blake Gopnik's list "The 10 Most Important Artists of Today".

In 2012, a major retrospective of her work was held at Whitechapel Gallery, London (March–June 2012), which surveyed her career and premiered new films and sculptures. The exhibition was organised with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and supported by Maja Hoffmann, Vicky Hughes and John Smith, and Dr Naomi Milgrom AO.

In 2013, Wearing showed her exhibit People: Selected Parkett Artists' Editions from 1984 to 2013 Parkett Space, Zurich, Switzerland (9 February-11 March 2013).

On 30 October 2014 her sculpture A Real Birmingham Family was unveiled in front of the Library of Birmingham.

On 24 April 2018, her statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett was unveiled in London's Parliament Square; it is the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square. This makes Wearing the first woman to create a statue that is in Parliament Square.

2020s

From November 5, 2021 to April 4, 2022, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City was showing Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks, the first retrospective of Wearing's work in North America.