Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing was born in 1963 in Birmingham and currently lives and works in London. As a member of the Young British Art movement, she won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1997. Much of her work is centered on “asking questions about truth… I always seek ways to discover new things about people, and in this process, I learn more about myself.” The work in the Iannaccone collection is a small sculpture titled Terri. Made of painted bronze, it is placed on a marble base that tells the story of these everyday heroes.

“I wanted to create some social sculptures,” the artist explains in an interview, “that celebrate the heroic actions of certain individuals. I wanted to make a small sculpture so that I could construct a portable collection in which each monument could be easily visualized as a whole. By coincidence, all the individuals portrayed have come from uniformed vocations: two police officers and a soldier. I didn’t want to show them in uniform but in everyday clothes to reveal their true faces, those of the quotidian, while the words inscribed on the plaques positioned on the small pedestals explain the extraordinary events for which they are to be remembered.”

On September 11, 2001, Terri, a support officer for the NYPD, was present during the collapse of the Twin Towers. She was just a few meters away when the buildings fell, sustaining a broken ankle and suffering head injuries from falling debris. She also had shards of glass embedded in her back. Despite these traumas, she got back on her feet, rescued three more victims from the rubble, and later assisted in evacuating a condominium. When she was about to be transported to the hospital by ambulance, she insisted on waiting for the paramedics to take another injured person before her.