Fiona Banner (b. 1966, Liverpool, UK) is an English artist, who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002. Much of Banner’s artistic practice illuminates the limitations and possibilities of language and its cultural parameters, investigating the slippage between object, image and text. Her multi-disciplinary practice encompasses drawing, film, sculpture, installation, as well as publishing and performance. Upon graduating from Goldsmiths College of Art in London in 1993, Banner came to prominence in the 1990s with her ‘wordscapes’, written transcriptions of iconic Hollywood war films retold frame-by-frame in the artist’s own stream-of-consciousness writing. The 1,000 page book The NAM (1997), for example, describes the plots of six Vietnam films in their entirety. As Banner has stated, “…a lot of my earlier work is about how things are expressed or can become manifest through words – how you can visualise passages of time through language.” Banner has long-standing fascination with the emblem of fighter aircraft and their role within culture, which has resulted, amongst others, in her monumental Harrier & Jaguar installation at the Tate Britain in 2010. Banner’s longstanding interest in Hollywood films, conflict and language has more recently led to set of interrelated bodies of work that investigate Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its various iterations. Banner lives and works in London, where she runs her imprint The Vanity Press. Banner is represented in major collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum; Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and commissions at Tate Britain, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Power Plant, Toronto; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; IKON, Birmingham and the DuPont, Tilburg, Netherlands.
