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Gillian Wearing
Shortlisted: 1997

Using photographs and video, Gillian Wearing has collaborated with members of the public, young and old, to produce work that yields insights, both funny and disturbing, into the complexities of everyday life. Her work often highlights the friction between public and private, between individual impulse and established norms of behavior. In 1992 she began a series called Signs., photos of people holding placards on which they had spontaneously written what they were thinking or feeling when Wearing approached them in the street.

Gillian Wearing was born in Birmingham, England in 1963. Between 1985 and 1990 she studied at Chelsea School of Art and then Goldsmiths College. She won the Turner Prize in 1997, for the sustained development of her work as seen at the Henry Moore Studio and with her video work 10:16, shown at the Chisenhale Gallery.

This information has been taken from The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, by Virginia Button, Tate Publishing, 2003.

View Gillian Wearing in the Tate Collection