OUR LIVES IN HER HANDS Gillian Wearing continues to explore the changing roles of women with her suffragist statue in Parliament Square
Gillian Wearing refuses to be typecast as an artist working in one genre, as her extraordinary portfolio proves. Having challenged preconceptions of age, gender, identity and power, she has now broken the male monopoly of Parliament Square, with a compell
Gillian Wearing has beautiful hands. Long and slender, with tapering, sensitive fingers, they look made to clasp a paintbrush or wield a stylus. I reflect on this as I gaze at them, cast in bronze and looming five feet above my head.
The Turner Prize-winning artist and I are standing together in Parliament Square beneath her latest creation, the statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett. Gaggles of tourists and parties of schoolchildren swirl around us, drawn inexorably over to look.
Today, Fawcett’s statue is by far the most popular in the square – partly because it is small enough to seem approachable, and partly because its rich detail demands closer inspection. You can stroke the individual threads in the tweedy fabric of Fawcett’s skirt, see the loose stitching in her banner, and, yes, recognise the artist’s own fingers in the hands that hold it up. ‘I wanted to leave a trace of myself,’ says Wearing. Her piece is domestic and personal, a riposte to the vainglory of the towering monuments to Disraeli and Palmerston. ‘This is a very daunting space, it’s all about power, so it’s nice to bring things into a more human scale, so people can relate. I wanted it to be inclusive.’
The Fawcett statue was commissioned after a public campaign by the feminist activist Caroline Criado Perez. While jogging round Parliament Square on International Women’s Day in 2016, she realised that no female political figure was represented in the statues surrounding it. Neither, it turned out, was the work of a female artist.
‘Until Caroline noticed that huge gap, it wasn’t really the conversation about Parliament Square. We needed someone to point out that half the population wasn’t represented at all,’ says Wearing (who admits that until then she had never been to the square herself. ‘I’d just passed it on the bus’). Perhaps this is another reason why the statue is so intriguing – as a society, we are far better attuned to sculptures showing women as nubile representations of abstract concepts, such as justice, peace or victory, than to portraits of individual human beings.
And there is nothing nubile about Fawcett. The age at which she should be depicted had been a matter for discussion, since she had worked tirelessly in the cause of women’s suffrage from the age of 19 until her seventies, and was over 80 when she sat in the House of Commons to witness the passing of the 1928 Equal Franchise Act. In the end, Wearing sought the advice of Criado Perez. ‘She immediately said middle-aged, because that’s when her major achievements were – just like the men. But we aren’t used to it. It makes you realise how unusual it is to see a middle-aged female statue, unless it’s Queen Victoria.’ Wearing conducted exhaustive research into her subject to depict her as accurately as possible. ‘I read that Millicent walked everywhere. For a very short meeting, she might walk for an hour and a half, and then an hour and a half back. She was very stoical and practical,’ says Wearing; so she commissioned a bespoke walking dress for her model from the costume designer Deirdre Clancy, who is an expert on the period, having won a Bafta for her work on Mrs Brown. Fawcett’s famous rallying cry, ‘courage calls to courage everywhere’, taken from her speech commemorating the death of the suffragette Emily Davison under the hooves of the King’s horse, was hand-stitched onto a banner. Wearing also approached the Fawcett Society to try to source and replicate some of the social reformer’s own possessions. ‘I’d seen a bag but it didn’t work, so we borrowed her brooch.’
Once all the elements had been assembled, they were scanned and 3-D-printed, a complicated process, says Wearing, since the enlarged scale of the statue meant it had to be printed in sections. Then a wax model was cast and used in the centuries-old ‘lost wax process’ to make a mould into which the molten bronze could be poured. Around the plinth,
Wearing etched the photographs of 59 other suffrage campaigners to emphasise the collective effort of the movement – which, pleasingly, means that more women than men are now represented in Parliament Square. ‘The Square is at statue-saturation point, so it would have to be an extraordinary circumstance for another to go in there,’ Wearing explains. ‘This was probably the last chance to represent diversity. When I put in the proposal, that was the first idea that went through.’
A few weeks after the shoot, Wearing and I meet again at the studio in Bethnal Green she shares with her long-term partner, the artist Michael Landy, whom she first met when they were both at Goldsmiths. Landy is famous for Break Down (2001), a piece of performance art in which he took over a deserted shop in Oxford Street and systematically destroyed all his belongings; which no doubt helps explain the Spartan appearance of the room we are sitting in. There is a line of kitchen cabinets on one side of the room, a bookcase on the other, and an empty table in the middle; the only extraneous clutter, if you can call it that, is the dog lead lying on the concrete floor that belongs to their Staffie, May.
Wearing has been hard to pin down for this second meeting as she has been busy filming a new piece for the Cincinnati Art Museum with the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy. ‘I’ve been working seven days a week,’ she says, as she makes me tea in a Cornishware mug. It is to be an advertisement featuring herself, she says; but more she will not reveal. ‘It’s not fully finished yet, so it’s quite hard to talk about. I’m not good at talking about things before they’re locked down.’
With her long hair, feline features and slender frame, Wearing has a will-o’-the-wisp quality that is matched by a corresponding distaste for being pinned down. She has always refused to be pigeonholed into a particular specialism, working in photography, video, sculpture and performance art as the mood takes her. ‘When you do a foundation course, they teach you all the disciplines, but then you’re supposed to specialise,’ she says. ‘But at Goldsmiths, they said, “Anything can be art.” If you have a notion of something you want to work on, then you have to think of how you can best go about it.’
Wearing was brought up in Birmingham, where her mother was a butcher and her father ran a shop selling and renting televisions. She was a shy and naturally artistic child; she recalls sketching passers-by, filling an album with drawings of imaginary friends and making little sculptures from self-drying clay. ‘I did Adam and Eve based on a painting by Michelangelo – I didn’t know at the time that was who it was by.’ Her parents’ expectations were limited to her being able to support herself financially, so when she left school at 16, it was to work at McDonald’s, and subsequently as a junior clerk in an insurance brokerage. A year later, she moved to London in search of a better job, sharing a room in a hostel with two friends. ‘They were both hairdressers, and they were the creative people in my life,’ she says. The trio used to draw pictures of each other at night as there was no television in their room; but it was only when Wearing got a clerical job in a Soho studio, and saw the animators painting on film cells, that the idea of going to art school took hold. ‘It’s strange when I think about it now – I was on the equivalent of about £30,000, and I gave it all up.’
Her sketches of her friends proved to be her entry into the foundation course at Chelsea. ‘Up to that point, I’d never really understood education, it felt boring. Here, every day was fantastic.’
It was the process she enjoyed, rather than any dreams of future fame and fortune. ‘It wasn’t a period when anyone
expected to leave and have a gallery exhibition,’ she says. ‘I remember thinking, “If I have one group show, I’ll be happy.” I knew
I’d have to have another job as well – I was just grateful to have been to art school.’
What changed the scene was her generation of artists. She graduated from
Goldsmiths in the wake of Damien Hirst,
Sarah Lucas and Landy, though she loathes the YBA tag that is often attached to them.
‘We were an eclectic group of artists that did very different work but came together to help each other find spaces. When I think of YBA, I think of WAG, you know, a bit of a joke, something to fight against…’
After graduating in 1990, she began her major work, Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, for which she photographed strangers holding up a sheet of paper on which they had written down their innermost thoughts (a work that finds an echo in the posture and banner of Fawcett).
‘Of course it wouldn’t have worked if everyone had written “Hello Mum!”’ she says. ‘But people said extraordinary things, it was amazing.’ Most striking, perhaps, was the self-satisfied young banker, whose sign read ‘I’m desperate’. ‘I absolutely believe he was telling the truth,’ says Wearing. ‘When I started the project, I felt like there were a lot of voices that weren’t represented. I think that’s why social media has worked: people want to be heard.’
Her fascination with human duality, and the divergence between public and private personas, has been a constant motif throughout her career. In 1994, she made a video in which volunteers confessed to painful secrets wearing comedy disguises; and in 2003, she made accurate silicone masks of her family, and then wore them to recreate old family photographs, becoming in turn both her parents, her siblings, her late grandmother and herself as a small child, in order to explore family dynamics literally from the inside. ‘I could have gone down the prosthetics route and added pieces to my own face, but I wanted to be encased in the mask. You get a better sense of someone if you really have their face,’ she says. ‘It was interesting, how you can get trapped in your thoughts about people. But when you become them, you have to think of them as individuals, rather than as a unit, and it’s very liberating, letting them have their own agency and their own concerns.’ The photographs are strangely surreal; the more you look, the more you realise something isn’t quite right, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what.
Wearing is just as interested in exploring her own identity as that of other people; last year, she created a special cover for Bazaar Art wearing a mask of her own face at the age of 35 (she’s in her mid-fifties now) and showed photographs of herself at the National Gallery that had been digitally aged by forensic artists to show her in her seventies. Was that a daunting project, I wonder, to age herself by two decades overnight? ‘There was one photograph where I thought I looked cooler then than I do now,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I fear ageing. The important thing is always to be engaged in the world. As a society, we need to change the way we look at age. In the past, perhaps, people did become more invisible when they were older, but that has to change.’
I think back to Wearing’s statue of Millicent Fawcett, the perfect expression of her views: tired and wrinkled, yes, but strong, steadfast, and impossible to ignore.
‘I wanted to be encased in the mask. You get a better sense of someone if you really have their face’