Since the beginning of her career, Gillian Wearing has drawn from techniques of theatre, reality television, and fly-on-the-wall documentary-making to construct narratives that explore personal fantasies and confessions, individual traumas, cultural histories, and the role of the media. Anonymity through elaborate masks, costumes and role-play has remained a critical part of Wearing’s practice and influential investigation of the ways in which individuals present themselves to others when the self is temporarily concealed.

Her work has also been shown at the Museum of Modern Art & MoMA PS1 in New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre in London, Kunsthaus Zurich in Switzerland, National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, New Museum in New York, George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY, and at the Hessel Museum at Bard College in New York. An important member of the Young British Artists, Wearing was awarded the Turner Prize in 1997.

Courtesy of Plinth