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For Gillian, this project began in earnest in 2001 though its seeds were sown many years ago. Much of the work she makes is collaborative and nearly all of it relies to a significant extent on performance. The performative aspect of her practice is often displaced by our attention to the social, or documentary flavour of the content in her art. What is lost when we ground her work, with its often mesmerising lure of trauma and the real, in the stable category and tradition of documentary is its reliance on role playing. We each play roles, but so too do roles play us. Perhaps this is why we find masks so compelling and can easily acknowledge their truth. A mask is a shield that allows us to turn what is normally our outward identity in on itself and give it shelter, but also expose it to close and safe scrutiny. It is as if we don a mask to unmask something, or someone else.

Before Gillian made Self-portrait (2000), where she wears a semi-translucent mask of her own likeness, the work that seemed nearest to a self-portrait was Homage to the woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down Walworth Road (1995). In the video Gillian enacts what she recognised from the passenger seat of a car as a remarkable display of courage. She plays a role in which her performance is at once an act of reportage. Jean-Luc Godard commented once that ‘Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.’ I don’t think Gillian would be embarrassed if I reported here that she is self-conscious still today. It’s clearly not about her image or outward identity, or even that aspect of identity we locate metaphorically as being on the inside. The torn snapshot of the young girl in her kitchen is perhaps early evidence enough. Still, we each may be self-conscious about the role that was scripted not necessarily to be played but to play us primarily through language and its origins in the family.





In 2002 Gillian made a photograph based on a snapshot her mother took of her grandmother sitting in a garden in her wheelchair. Gillian’s image was itself homage to someone who had passed. In the photo, her head sinks between her shoulders and all but disappears beneath a straw sun hat, as the slender fingers of her wizened hand are folder in her lap, her outstretched legs are bandaged about the calves. The image, Nancy Gregory (2002), is in itself a conceptual model of the essence of a photograph in that Gillian has made a living image of a dead thing, or something that has passed. Each photograph we look at, Barthes reminds us if ever we should forget, is exactly that.

Working to mine internal states through external channels has for long been a feature of Wearing’s art and is particularly evident in her work around the structures of a family with its familiarity, closeness, breeding, and often contempt. 2 into 1 from 1997 delved into the depths of the way such forces are expressed in language that speaks and forms a child’s consciousness. Our speaking parts and roles are shaped early in childhood. I wonder if it is as early as in the powerful and no doubt frightening period of the mirror stage when we learn our face is already a mask that belongs to us but also to others. Gillian made a photograph of two young sisters arm in arm in a London park – Kelly and Melanie – where the younger sister reaches up to adjust the elder’s smile into a grimace. Every photograph of a face is a mask. The impenetratable surface of an image somehow guarantees this as it flattens out the three dimensional contours of one’s identity. To attempt to penetrate the interior of a photograph is to enter a fantasy space. Like Woody Allen in the role of Zelig, one tries to step back into a history and place where by necessity one could not have been. In early September 2001, Gillian was looking at a photograph of her mother that she had had in her possession for at least as long as the 1980s and certainly remembers seeing as a child. It is 1953 and Jean Gregory is 21. We’re not shown the original photograph and in a very real sense it is unimportant. Even if it was made available, we would not recognise in it the rare essence Gillian has gleaned from her intimate knowledge of the original and performed in the images she is making herself.

In the reproduction of Self-portrait as my mother Jean Gregory (2003) I see elements of Gillian in a face I do not really know but am strangely familiar with. I see a young woman dressed for the H-bomb, caught in history and yet optimistic and quietly confident in her beauty and somehow her future. Since 1997 Gillian has been looking continually at issues of the family, though increasingly from within her own context. Talking about the frustrations she experienced early on in trying to make work around this subject, Gillian says, ‘I have been trying to get to an essence of what makes work capable of being read outside my own immediate experience and have meaning for someone else. But it hasn’t really worked for me until now.’ Gillian works very slowly even when all the elements of a piece are in her control. Every piece I have ever spoken with her about is generated from a tautly balanced equation of emotional, conceptual, and technical values. Gillian has been working on this series of images since the middle of 2001. Trying to find the right people to work with and a situation where the communication is in place has been difficult. The process that goes into making a work is lengthy anyway. ‘The process is fantastic and you can perfect it and I am working with it to get what I want and is in my mind’s eye, but at the end of the day,’ Gillian tells me, ‘it is the idea that I am trying to achieve and that is what’s important to me.’ She collaborates with a sculptor named Doug Jennings. They work in clay to model a mask that conveys an essence from a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional object. Gillian then works with others to come up with a prosthetic silicon mask. Her face is the index of the mask on its interior while the memory of an image and essence of a relation she performs is the index of the mask’s outer surface. The masks are fragile and at the same time very heavy and cumbersome. They are transient and, like a photograph, as soon as an image is made their time is past and they are literally gone.

‘The photograph was never an image of oneself, always an image of oneself as an other.’ Over and again this is the line Barthes writes in my mind. To act, to play a role in the making of an image is to perform a self before a camera always from behind a mask. In the video Western Security (1995), one of Gillian’s most stridently performative pieces, she worked with a cowboy recreation society to stage a costumed role playing fantasy – a gunfight inside the space of a gallery. The players were later treated to a screening of their original performance and a video was made of their costumed reaction to their play in The Regulators’ Vision (1995–6). For once they got to see their connection to a chosen and alternative mask. In Gillian’s series centred on her own family album she was looking for something rarer: ‘I was interested in the idea of being genetically connected to someone but being very different. There is something of me, literally, in all those people – we are connected, but we are each very different.’ In the images she makes from those of her mother to be, or father, brother, sister, maternal uncle, or even those four photo booth portraits of herself taken in Birmingham in 1981–2, Gillian will be looking back at memories and images of herself and others. At the same time, she will be remembering what it was like to look at images and imagine a future that was still to be written or photographed. The result will no doubt be to know better who she was there and then and how she got to where she is in the here and now. To know who we are and where we come from is perhaps our most fundamental human task. Think about it when you put on the mask you are wearing today.

John Slyce is a writer and critic based in London

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