Gillian Wearing's art draws largely on documentary photography, film, and television techniques to investigate notions of individual identity in private and public space. Her work also explores the role of media technology in blurring the distinctions between the public and private, reality and fiction.
Read MoreWearing's early work included photographs and videos that recorded chance encounters with ordinary people, with an emphasis on interactions that elicited moments of confession or self-exposure.
Wearing first attracted public acclaim with the photographic series Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992—93). This series of around 600 colour photographs captures passersby on the streets of London, who Wearing asked to pose with a phrase written on a piece of paper, thereby 'displaying their thoughts'. The resulting photographs depict everyday people in often incongruous juxtapositions with their written text, such as I'm Desperate (1992—93), subverting the generic conventions associated with documentary photography or photographic portraiture.
Wearing's challenging of norms associated with the genres of documentary photography and photographic portraiture is also evident in Confess All On Video. Don't Worry You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian (1994). For this 35-minute video, Wearing recruited subjects through a classified advertisement with the title of the artwork as its text, and filmed participants disclosing their fears and fantasies while disguised in masks or wigs. Using the distancing technique of costuming, Confess All On Video disrupts the power relationships inherent in both the staging and viewing of documentary footage; the subjects are permitted to espouse a 'truth' that viewers do not have access to.
Much of Wearing's work includes the recurring use of the mask as a motif. Aligned with her interest in the tension between truth and fiction, the use of the mask as a performative device has a long history of enabling the wearer access to a more fundamental truth in the absence of superficial markers of identity. In Wearing's works, however, the viewer experiences the disorienting effect of having their access to an objective version of truth denied.
Wearing has produced many self-portraits that involve wearing masks of her own face and of the faces of others in a bid to explore the various personae of her subjects. For the photographic series Album (2003—06), Wearing recreates her old family photos by dressing herself in highly realistic silicone masks based on the appearances of her family members and herself at younger ages, such as Self Portrait as my Mother Jean Gregory (2003).
For Lockdown, Gillian Wearing's exhibition at Maureen Paley, London in 2020, Wearing continued her exploration of identity, reality and fiction through a series of watercolour self-portraits and a sculpture entitled Mask Masked (2020), which brought the emblematic surgical mask of the COVID-19 pandemic into the fold of her interrogations of identity and masking.
