Collection: Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing (born 1963, Birmingham) is a British artist whose practice in photography and video centres on the relationship between public performance and private experience. Winner of the Turner Prize in 1997, Wearing came to prominence with works that invited strangers to participate in acts of self-disclosure — holding up handwritten signs bearing their private thoughts, confessing to camera behind masks, or re-enacting scenes from their own past.

Her work occupies the territory between documentary and fiction, between the found and the staged. Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992–93) established the terms of a practice that has continued to explore the gap between social appearance and interior life — what people show, what they conceal, and what happens when the two are briefly made to coincide.

Wearing has exhibited with Maureen Paley in London and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. Publications produced in connection with her practice — catalogues, monographs, and printed matter — document a body of work that remains one of the most sustained investigations into identity and self-representation in contemporary British art.