Gillian Wearing

In the 1960s, British painter Francis Bacon surprises a burglar and invites him to share his bed. The burglar, a working class man named George Dyer, accepts. After the unique beginning to their love affair, the well-connected and volatile artist assimilates Dyer into his circle of eccentric friends, as Dyer's struggle with addiction strains their bond.

Contemporary artist Gillian Wearing celebrates the legacy of Victorian novelist George Eliot. Just as Eliot’s novel Middlemarch explored the lives of ordinary men and women, this experimental film is made up of a diverse cast of people from different backgrounds.

In 2007, Gillian Wearing placed an advert – in newspapers, online, in job centers, and elsewhere. It read: “Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian.” Of the hundreds of people who replied, seven – chosen through an extended process of auditions, interviews, and workshops – ended up appearing in Self Made. Of those seven, five in particular use the acting technique known as Method to delve into their memories, impulses, anxieties, fears, fantasies, and inner resources to create a series of individual performance vignettes, their personal ‘end scenes’, that reveal with particular intensity and clarity who they really are deep down – or who, in another version of their lives, they might easily have been.

Consists of seven short films back projected onto a screen 18 feet wide. The films show adult actors lip-synching to a soundtrack taken from interviews that Wearing recorded with children between the age of 10 and 16. The disjuncture between the impact of an adult speaking with the cadence, words and even the bearing of a child is the initial focus of the work. The films’ simple locations, such as a bus stop and a bathroom, provide a foil to the narratives, which are complex, compelling and, at some points, surreal. The films are moving, and yet the emotional punch they pack are subtle and finely judged. The awkwardness and incredible insight of early adolescence is evident and challenges the viewer’s assumptions and nostalgia.

Shot in a southeast London shopping mall, Dancing in Peckham depicts the artist freely dancing alone, without headphones and unaccompanied by music. Wearing’s camera also positions passersby as unwitting participants in the performance.

A mother and her twins talk about each other. The device of miming each others words, gives a disconcerting twist to the children's cruel honesty and their mother's unconditional adoration.

"Bully" documents an exercise in which a young man who has been bullied re-creates the experience with a group of participants. One takes on the young man's role while the others play the bullies or individuals who stood by, watching it happen instead of intervening.