Gillian Wearing: Everyone's got a secret

Gillian Wearing’s studio, a former warehouse in east London, is dominated by an enormous bouquet. All around it, stems lie discarded like pickup sticks, while further blooms burst from a plastic bag nearby. On a rainy March day, the sight of so many flowers is uplifting. Wearing smiles. “They’re all fake,” she says.

I should have known. Since graduating in 1990, a year after Damien Hirst, from Goldsmiths College in south-east London, Wearing has specialised in art that lays bare its own artifice.

Last year she made a black-and-white photograph of plastic flowers called People that will be part of a mid-career survey of her work opening at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London later this month. She is currently finishing a full-colour companion piece called People Too that will be shown when the exhibition tours to Düsseldorf and Munich.

“I was looking at the flower paintings of Brueghel,” she explains. “They look quite surreal, and that’s because flowers were incredibly expensive and rare in those times – supposedly a single tulip would have been worth more than one of his paintings. So he had a finite time to draw each one before it died, and he would make these composite images, which I imagine was a bit like using Photoshop.

“The flowers didn’t sit naturalistically together, but each one was important, and I wanted to use that as an analogy for people – trying to make each flower like a unique person.”

Wearing’s admiration for Brueghel may come as a surprise, since she belongs to the generation of Young British Artists that shocked their way to prominence during the Nineties. Aren’t they supposed to be inspired by cigarette butts, dead flies and cows’ heads, rather than Old Masters?

Wearing, though, has never really conformed to the YBA stereotype. Considered, modest and polite, she has always gone about her business quietly, examining how ordinary people present themselves in public and private in a series of subtle photographs, videos and films.

In a manner similar to the American artist Cindy Sherman, Wearing explores the nature of identity and the complexities of personality. Her flower pictures are the latest incarnation of that long-held preoccupation: each artificial bloom is a metaphor for how we behave when we feel we have to impress.

Now 48, Wearing grew up in Birmingham, and studied at Chelsea School of Art before enrolling at Goldsmiths. Her time at Chelsea is often overlooked, but it laid the foundations for her obsession with portraiture. “I really loved Rembrandt,” she recalls. “That sense that there was something far richer going on underneath the surface of those oils, that there was somebody really there.”

After graduating from Goldsmiths, she started creating portraits of her own. She soon demonstrated a knack for getting people to reveal their innermost thoughts. “Everyone’s got a secret,” she tells me – and this skill still underpins her art today.

Her breakthrough was a series of around 600 photographs called Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992-93), in which passers-by hold up messages composed on sheets of A3 paper provided by Wearing. A policeman presents a sign that says “Help”; someone with a tattoo on his face reveals: “I have been certified as mildly insane!” In the most famous image of the lot, a man in a suit and tie has written: “I’m desperate”.

“It’s always important as an artist to find a unique language, and that’s why the Signs excited me,” says Wearing, who won the Turner Prize in 1997. “They felt new. But I didn’t realise they were going to be so influential, on everything from advertising to people doing signs for their Facebook page.”

Wearing’s conceit became shorthand for emotional honesty – there’s even a scene in Richard Curtis’s 2003 film Love Actually in which a character confesses his love for someone else by holding up handwritten signs in the street.

This ability to predict the mood of the moment before it fully crystallises is a hallmark of Wearing’s work. As Daniel Herrmann, who curated her Whitechapel exhibition, puts it: “Artists are like seismographs registering quakes to come. Gillian coined a number of aesthetics during the Nineties that are mainstream now. She was 20 years ahead of her time.”

Another cultural “quake” she registered was the rise of reality television and talk shows. Fascinated as a girl by “radical” TV documentaries such as Paul Watson’s 1974 fly-on-the-wall series The Family, Wearing started experimenting with a video camera in the early Nineties.

She placed a magazine advertisement that read, “Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian…” The words became the title of the subsequent work, a 30-minute video of 10 participants revealing outlandish “confessions” while wearing masks from a fancy dress shop.

The masks emphasised the artificiality of talking to a camera, but liberated the participants, by concealing their identities, to spill their secrets in an unprecedentedly frank manner. The results were so powerful and authentic that Wearing used the device again in her subsequent confessional pieces Trauma (2000), in which eight people recall troubling events experienced in childhood, and 2009’s Secrets and Lies.

“I work within a language that I feel I created,” she says, “within that realm of documentary, fiction, portraits, people – all the things that really matter to me. When Big Brother came out, I felt it was…” She pauses, weighing her words. “I think my work contributed in some way – or if it didn’t contribute, then it was part of something that was going to happen.”

Was she a fan of Big Brother? “Oh yes, from the beginning,” she laughs. “Creating a structure called Big Brother allowed us to see how life was elsewhere – and that’s what I do in my work: I find structures that reveal things about us, about people. Intuitively, I find ways to reflect life back, and the audience relates to it because there isn’t any judgment. That’s one thing I would never do in my work: judge people.”

One of the biggest influences upon Wearing has been the legacy of Andy Warhol – a debt she acknowledged in a recent self-portrait called Me as Warhol in Drag with Scar (in the same series she also impersonates the photographers Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe).

“For me, Warhol’s films were his most powerful work,” she says. “He advanced documentary-making because he had a sense of fly-on-the-wall before [the genre existed]. In the films with his superstars, there’s a sense of improvisation – it’s a bit like The Only Way Is Essex, where you know people are partly playing themselves, but they’re also improvising. Also, in his Screen Tests, he filmed [real] people sitting in front of the camera.”

Like Warhol, an enigma who sought the company of extroverts, Wearing is naturally reticent. “I am quite shy,” she says. “I’m OK in one-to-ones, but I try and avoid public speaking.”

How does she feel, then, on the eve of this major show? “I’m starting to get quite nervous,” she says. “But I really want the work to be seen – that’s why I make it.”

A week after the opening of her exhibition, a big survey of the career of Damien Hirst will open at Tate Modern. “I love Damien’s early work,” she says. “I see him now as a Richard Branson figure – he’s become an entrepreneur-maverick. I read in the papers that he’s going to build 500 eco-homes [on the north Devon coast]. Those projects, where you don’t know where he’s going next, are really interesting.”

It sounds, I say, as though she recognises a similarity between Hirst and Warhol – who was arguably stronger in the earlier stages of his career – and that being an artist is perhaps no longer Hirst’s primary strength. “Because Damien makes so much work a year,” she says, “I imagine you could take away a lot of that work, and you’d find at least one good work. But you can also be sidetracked by, you know, the stuff that isn’t so good.” Like what?

“Some of the paintings. There’s work that’s not good – of course.” She laughs. I suddenly imagine Wearing waiting until both exhibitions have opened before sending Hirst a congratulatory bunch of flowers – made of plastic.

'Gillian Wearing’ is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 (020 7522 7888), from March 28 to June 17