Dan Glaister
For the second consecutive year, Britain’s 20 000 Turner Prize has been awarded to a video artist.
The prize was presented to Gillian Wearing by the British Culture Secretary Chris Smith at the Tate Gallery in London. Her victory over the three other women on the prize’s first all-woman shortlist confirms the dominance of Goldsmiths College in the much talked-about contemporary British art scene.
Wearing (34) works in confessional video. Her most acclaimed pieces include adults lip-synching to the voices of their children, and Confess All on Video, in which people were filmed anonymously talking about their secrets.
The Turner Prize jury praised “the emotional force of her work and its complexity beneath an apparently simple surface”. They also praised “the way in which she has broadened both her working method and her subject matter, consistently producing unexpected insights into human behaviour”.
Wearing, who was born in Birmingham in 1963, studied at Chelsea School of Art before taking a BA in fine art at Goldsmiths College, London, which also produced Damien Hirst and many of the more prominent names in the world of “YBAs” – Young British Artists.
For the Turner Prize exhibition, she submitted two pieces: 60 Minutes Silence and Sacha and Mum. The former shows 26 people dressed in police uniform in what appears to be a group photograph. Small movements indicate, however, that it is a video. Sacha and Mum depicts a tense relationship, played by actors, in which a mother and daughter embrace and struggle with each other. But Wearing choreographs their movements and the film is projected backwards.