Gillian Wearing

Edelstein: The sociality of London seems quite strong in works like Dancing in Peckham (1994) . . .

Wearing: Well my first idea was to dance in Covent Garden, but I chose Peckham because it reminds me a bit more of Birmingham and it's quite local to where I live, but it also reminds me of those other aspects where you're not expecting something extraordinary to happen unless you're seeing someone who's mad, and how people deal with that. When it's a very mundane day with people doing very mundane activities, how do you actually cope with that situation? A lot of people just look out of the corner of their eyes — that's true or British people in general, I think.

Edelstein: It's also this idea of embarrassment.

Wearing: I first wanted to do the piece because I saw a woman in the Royal Festival Hall and she was dancing to a jazz band and I was more fascinated by her than the jazz band! She was going wild and wasn't with anyone. She was dancing by the tables rather than where the dance floor was. It was hysterical and kind of weird, and she obviously might have known that, and I was thinking that was quite an enviable position to be in, to lose your inhibitions and not worry about what other people think. So it's about the idea of losing your inhibitions — or trying to, for me it's quite hard.

Journal of Contemporary Art online - Interviews

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