Fiona Banner

b. 1966, Merseyside, England

Much of Fiona Banner’s work explores the problems and possibilities of written language. Her early work took the form of ‘wordscapes’ or ‘still films’ – blow-by-blow accounts written in her own words of feature films, (whose subjects range from war to porn) or sequences of events. These pieces took the form of solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size as a cinema screen. Banner’s current work encompasses sculpture, drawing and installation but text is still at the heart of her practice. She recently turned her attention to the idea of the classic, art-historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing the pose and form in a similar vein to her earlier transcription of films. Often using parts of military aircraft as the support for these descriptions, Banner juxtaposes the brutal and the sensual, performing an almost complete cycle of intimacy and alienation.

Fiona Banner’s work has been included in a large number of exhibitions both in Europe and the USA. She is represented in many important collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum; Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis; The Arts Council of England and the Tate Gallery, London. She was short-listed for the Turner Prize 2003.

http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/bio/fiona_banner

English sculptor and conceptual artist. She studied at Kingston Polytechnic, Surrey (1986–9), and at Goldsmiths' College of Art in London (1992–3). She had her first solo exhibition at City Racing, London, in 1994, and in the following year was included in General Release: Young British Artists at the XLVI Venice Biennale. Banner came to prominence with her ‘wordscapes', large text works that recount the plots of feature films or other events. The ‘wordscapes' led to the publication in 1997 of The Nam, 1,000 pages of continuous text describing the Vietnam war movies Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill and The Deer Hunter. This unreadable text points to the excess of violence in such films, the numbing of critical faculties, as well as the mythologising and fictionalising framing devices used to interpret historical events. Towards the end of the 1990s she became interested in the implications of punctuation signs, dwelling on their qualities as abstract marks that give structure to text. By selecting a variety of fonts, enlarging the full stop signs to 1,800 pt, and rendering them three-dimensionally, Banner created strangely dramatic objects, simple signs disguised as Minimalist sculpture. These were displayed together in Polystyrene Full Stops: Slipstream, Nuptial, Palatino, Times, Gill Sans Condensed, New Century Schoolbook (1998–9; Los Angeles, CA, 1301PE). The use of weightless polystyrene, which commonly functions as a packing material, points again to the paradox of the physical insignificance and semantic importance of these object–signs.

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2687&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=bio