GILLIAN WEARING
Gillian Wearing is a conceptual artist who uses the medium of photography and film to explore the theme of human identity.
Gillian Wearing was born in 1963. She grew up in a poorly educated working class family in Birmingham. She began her own adult life employed in the quintessential female support role of the typist secretary. Dissatisfied and feeling, as she puts it, 'illiterate' she moved to London in search of who she could be. Eventually after completing a portfolio course at Chelsea College of Art she studied Fine Arts at Goldsmiths. She won the Turner Prize in 1997 and was awarded an OBE in 2011. There was a major retrospective of her work at The Whitechapel Gallery in 2012.
Her subject matter reflects her own struggle with identity both from a personal and a socio-political perspective. She is however absent from the early works which were collaborative and focused on allowing others to have a voice. She is completely against the documentary style of photography which does not ask permission of the subject. She challenges the idea that a snapshot in time denotes 'the truth' ...
"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...I couldn't bear the idea of taking photographs of people without their knowledge."
Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say. 1992' and 'Confess all on video. Don't worry, you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian : 1994' were intended to be democratising and were exhibited en mass to show the true diversity of people who chose to take part. Humans are programmed to read faces before anything else that they see. They read the face, then they read text or listen to words. When Wearing gave strangers paper to write on or video cameras to use she was giving them the ability to create messages to challenge our preconceptions. The artwork then becomes a conduit in the process, in the three way conversation between the photographer, the viewer and the subject about human visual acuity.
Her subject matter reflects her own struggle with identity both from a personal and a socio-political perspective. She is however absent from the early works which were collaborative and focused on allowing others to have a voice. She is completely against the documentary style of photography which does not ask permission of the subject. She challenges the idea that a snapshot in time denotes 'the truth' ...
"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...I couldn't bear the idea of taking photographs of people without their knowledge."
Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say. 1992' and 'Confess all on video. Don't worry, you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian : 1994' were intended to be democratising and were exhibited en mass to show the true diversity of people who chose to take part. Humans are programmed to read faces before anything else that they see. They read the face, then they read text or listen to words. When Wearing gave strangers paper to write on or video cameras to use she was giving them the ability to create messages to challenge our preconceptions. The artwork then becomes a conduit in the process, in the three way conversation between the photographer, the viewer and the subject about human visual acuity.
The bulk of her oeuvre examines what we show to the world and how it might feel to be someone else. She is artist as anthropologist and her most enduring motif has been the hidden subject 'behind the mask'. Masks give us the opportunity to inhabit a space we have not met before and to exhibit a face which is not our own. It is the oldest known artifice of disguise, used as a barrier, a beautifier, a tool. This she has taken to the extreme by using whole body masks where the only visible part of her are her eyes. These whole 'in another body' experiences include Diane Arbus, her own sister, her brother, and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Although the male masks are very heavy and painful to wear, she has found them the most rewarding.
"I think if you look carefully at the eyes you can see they are female, but the masks have a very strong presence. Of course, I use a different type of performance to be a man rather than a woman...The further you get away from your own identity, the more liberating it is."
Gillian's work continues to challenge our notion of identity. She has recently developed her 3D practice into sculpture with a piece called 'A Real Birmingham Family' which has been installed in Centenary Square, Birmingham 2014. It depicts two sisters who are both single mothers happily walking hand in hand with their children. It is a comment on modern motherhood but also examines the role of family, what is family identity now? The site of the sculpture has seen several protests against this as a motif of family family life. One notable demonstration from a member of pressure group Fathers For Justice, placed sheets over the mothers heads and stuck photographs of his own children over the faces of the children. he then took a photograph of him holding hands with one of the children in the pose of the mother.
Wearing welcomes the debate. For her male or female is a very small part of what she is exploring.
"Identity comes from nature, nurture, chance, fate, experience, gender, age...the list is endless. We are too complex for it to be one item on the list."