Fiona Banner

Fiona Banner (Merseyside, 1966) creates sculptures, drawings, installations, films, books and performances. Language and its visual representations often play a key role in these works. Her sculptures of a full stop, for instance, are objects that literally punctuate the space of the exhibition. For her handmade neon pieces – an alphabet and individual punctuation marks – she bent and shaped the molten glass herself. Manipulating fragile materials is also one of the themes addressed in Work 1, a life-sized glass scaffold [link].

Banner’s early work took the form of ‘wordscapes’ (i.e. word landscapes) and ‘still films’, which were descriptions of entire films or single scenes, written in her own words. Examples include The Desert (1994/95) from Lawrence of Arabia; Break Point (1998), inspired by a chase scene in Point Break; and Arsewoman in Wonderland (2001), after the pornographic film by the same name. These wall drawings expanded to become massive blocks of text, often presented in the exact size and shape of a cinema screen. 

Her most well-known publication, The Nam (1997), is a 1,000-page volume in which she strings together six films about the Vietnam War – including Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket – to create a single continuous text. It was published by her own imprint, The Vanity Press (also her pseudonym), which she founded for that purpose in the same year.

Banner is fascinated by the symbolic power of military equipment. In fact, more recent works incorporate parts of military aircraft and helicopters (see Nose Art and Spine). Her film Pranayama Organ (2021) depicts a dawn sky against which two of the military’s inflatable decoy planes expand to become living, breathing creatures. These ‘bloated, posing beasts’ (as Banner calls them) are more a sign of weakness than a display of power.