Fiona Banner

Banner’s practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation, bookmaking and performance, she has often returned to language and its physical form, from creating sculptural full-stops which literally punctuate gallery spaces to  huge wall drawings describing in words everything from a popular films to The Battle of Hastings. Later works use military airplane parts and even whole fighterplanes; intruments of war which the artist sees as the result of language's failure. For the last few years Banner has been working with neon sign makers  creating her own hand-made neon pieces dealing with the alphabet and punctuation in a pictorial way. Using neon tubes has led the artist to think about glass, its possibilities and limits. 

When describing this work the artist states, “I spend a lot of time up scaffold towers during the making of large wall drawings, so the experience of being high up on a scaffold is intimately associated with process, the tension between the idea of the work and the completion of the work; between something not existing and existing, it’s a kind of fantasy space, it is a precarious moment. When the scaffold is gone I always miss it”. 
Similarly the reality of art itself is often temporary - it is put up, installed, then stored or erased. Work 1 echoes the lean yet unintentional aesthetics of this structure, which combines maximum strength, with maximum temporality. By using glass to build that which is meant to support, Banner compounds the inherent fragility of the very medium she is using. Through it she provides us with a structure that plays at a game of opposites - it is present yet implies an absence, solid while also remaining transparent.