Background
Fiona Banner was born in Merseyside, North West England.
Fiona Banner was born in Merseyside, North West England.
She studied at Kingston University and completed her Master of Arts at Goldsmiths College in 1993.
In 2010, she produced new work for a Duveen Hall commission at Tate Britain. She is one of the Young British Artists. The next year she held her first solo exhibition at City Racing.
In 1995, she was included in General Release: Young British Artists held at the XLVI Venice Biennale.
She is one of the "key names", along with Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gary Hume, Sam Taylor-Wood, Tacita Dean and Douglas Gordon, of the Young British Artists. Her early work took the form of "wordscapes" or "still films"—blow-by-blow accounts written in her own words of feature films including Point Break (1991) and The Desert (1994).
Her work took the form of solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size as a cinema screen. In 1997, she founded The Vanity Press, through which she published her own works, such as the Nam, The Bastard Word and All The World"s Fighter Planes.
The Nam (1997), is a 1,000-page book which describes the plots of six Vietnam films in their entirety: the films are Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Platoon.
The wall of her show in the Turner Prize exhibition at was dominated by a 6 x 4-metre advertising billboard, titled Arsewoman in Wonderland. The billboard presented a written description of a pornographic film. The Guardian asked, "lieutenant"s art
But is it porn?" calling in "Britain"s biggest porn star", Ben Dover, to comment.
Subsequent shows have included The Power Plant, Toronto, and Live/Work, at Museum of Modern Art, New New York In 2010, she was selected to create the 10th Duveen Hall commission at Tate Britain for which she transformed and displayed two decommissioned Royal Air Force fighter jets.
Banner’s work includes sculpture, drawing and installation. Text is the core of her oeuvre.
She has also treated 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.
On 1 October 2010, in an open letter to the British government"s culture secretary Jeremy Hunt—co-signed by a further 27 previous Turner prize nominees, and 19 winners—Banner opposed any future cuts in public funding for the arts In the letter the cosignatories described the arts in Britain as a "remarkable and fertile landscape of culture and creativity.".