During the lockdown enforced by the 2020-21 Covid pandemic Gillian Wearing turned to making a series of self-portraits. These were nearly all done in watercolour, although she also made a few in oils. Best known for her work exploring identity in film and photography since the early 1990s when she first came to prominence as one of the YBAs, the watercolours marked a new departure in her practice. Not since her first year as a student at Goldsmiths had she worked as a painter. As she explained: ‘We were taught to find a perfect medium for each idea you have, and so I went through a whole range of disciplines, from sculpture, photography, film, to performance, and never, until now, found a way back into oil and canvas. But the pandemic gave me the chance’. The restrictions on daily life imposed by lockdown became paradoxically a source of liberation. She has described picking up the brush and watercolour once more as a ‘bit like learning to drive again’ (quotations from her self-interview in Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks, by Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, New York: Guggenheim, 2021, p. 107).
A group of her Lockdown portraits painted in 2020 were recently included in her major retrospective exhibition ‘Wearing Masks’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This watercolour was produced during the 2021 lockdown. Here, she confronts us directly; her head is tilted slightly to the side, her lank hair falling in loose strands over her shoulders and house dress. She looks frankly dejected by the self-isolation and the sense of its unending boredom. Speaking of her Lockdown portraits, she has said: ‘I felt a need to do these paintings, and they ended up reflecting these times; they were about isolation, self-reflection, anxiety about the future, and being honest’. The British Museum was particularly keen to acquire this watercolour as an artistic response to the pandemic and its effects on the individual and the questioning of self-worth and sense of purpose that it provoked. It is her first watercolour to enter the collection.
