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GILLIAN WEARING
She was born in 1963 and is an English conceptual artist, she’s won the annual British fine arts award and the 1997 Turner Prize. In 2007 she was elected as a lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Gillian Wearing (2016).
Wearing make self portraits going back in time to when she was 3 years old, Self-portrait at Three years old (2004), but she also models in masks of her family members and takes self portraits as them too. She does this with elaborate silicone recreations of their faces and except for the gaps around the eyes they are quite convincing.
Gillian Wearing: Self-portrait at Three years old (2004)
According to Alastair Sooke writing in the Telegraph in 2012 Wearing has a fascination with artificial things, portraits and masks, which became a video and the series masks, The point of the masks in the Family series, was according to The Guardian (2012), to have been to make a collection of herself and family members’ portraits all at about the same age (17), apart from grandparents.
I have to admit I’m baffled by why the artist takes these self-portraits. I understand the technical challenge and logistics of the makeup and the fact that they are almost in repeatable as the mask quickly degenerate. I can see is she is exploring how she is in relation we family and her past self. Are the images narcissistic, perhaps not in the traditional sense but in how they draw attention to her and her family?
References
Sooke, A. (2012). Gillian Wearing: Everyone’s got a secret. [online] Telegraph.co.uk. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/9149522/Gillian-Wearing-Everyones-got-a-secret.html [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].
the Guardian. (2012). Gillian Wearing takeover: behind the mask – the Self Portraits. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/mar/27/gillian-wearing-takeover-mask [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].
En.wikipedia.org. (n.d.). Gillian Wearing. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Wearing [Accessed 14 Aug. 2018].