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.

Wearing was born in 1963 in Birmingham, England.

She attended Dartmouth High School in Great Barr, Birmingham.

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.

Wearing is known for her method of documentation of everyday life through photography and video, concerning individual identity within the private and the public spaces, where Wearing blurs the line between reality and fiction.

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.

Wearing's work reveals that the camera does not take a neutral stance towards its object, but is rather a powerful mass-media organ that breaks down the divide between public and private.

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.

Wearing sees that Anthropology "attempts to compress human subjectivity into scientific objectivity".

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.

In an interview with Donna De Salvo, Wearing states:

"For me, one of the biggest problems with pure documentary photography is how the photographer, like the artist, engineers something to look like a certain kind of social statement—for instance, you can make someone look miserable, when this is just one side, a nuance of their personality. They might just be looking away at something, but their expression could be read as showing a kind of depression in their overall behavior. I couldn't bear the idea of taking photographs of people without knowing".

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."

The audience's fantasies of imposing their own interpretations onto these photographed subjects are challenged and redirected by the paper that they are holding.

This exchange between Wearing and the subjects she photographed transformed the typically alienating portrait photography practise into an intimate conversational piece, linking photographer with subject, and audience with photographer.

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.

As the viewer, access to truth becomes dislocated.

Wearing presents this fictitious nature of the work as a report.

The use of masks also questions authenticity and how reality can be fabricated.

as said by Doris Krystof:

"Protected by masks, protected by their anonymity and protect by the free realm of art where their confessions are recorded but not judged, where there are no consequences to fear, no ideology or attempted appropriation to deal with, the participants could enjoy a sense of liberation and trust in their own voices."

In Homage to the woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down Walworth Road (1995), Wearing covers her head with white bandages and walks around in public.

Trauma (2000) is a further exploration of confessing with a mask.

The eight participants confess their trauma and the mask that is given reflects the age when they suffered their trauma, with the intention of transporting the viewer back to "the defining moment in the wearer's lives".

What's intriguing about this piece is that it seems like that it's not the first time that the participants have told their story because of how well rehearsed it looks.

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.

In 2007 Wearing was elected as lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Her statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett, popularly known as "Hanging out the washing", stands in London's Parliament Square.

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