Fiona Banner  born in Liverpool,studied fine art at Kingston Polytechnic, and completed an MA at Goldsmiths College in London in 1993.

who was short listed for the Turner Prize in 2002, and is seen as one of the Young British Artist (YBA's) BritArt group.

Her first solo exhibition was in 1994 at the capital's City Racing venue.

The possibilities of language - and its limitations - lie at the heart of her work.

The 36-year-old, who lives and works in London, creates text-based pieces, drawings, sculpture and sound, and she attempts to encapsulate action and time in a single form.

Feature films form the source of most of her work. Her wordscapes - or "still films" - are blow-by-blow accounts of entire movies, retold in her own words.

Her 1994 work, The Desert, retells Lawrence of Arabia using a vast plane of text similar in scale to a cinema screen - or an expanse of desert.

Similarly, 1991's Point Break is an account of the car chase in the film of the same name. The letters and lines of text gradually condense to reflect the rising tension.

In 1997, Banner published The Nam, a 1,000-page book containing a continuous transcription of six Vietnam war films - Apocalypse Now, Born On The Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Platoon.

Together with a 20-hour recording of the script, Banner attempted to construct a fantasy view of reality, aiming to make the action and violence meaningless.

Recently, Banner's work has focused on the space between words. In 1998 she exhibited a series of giant full stops in various different fonts, carved out of polystyrene.

The viewer was forced to negotiate the full-stops which were placed on the gallery floor, intended to punctuate the space as they would a block of text.

Her recent show Your Plinth Is My Lap featured "space confusers" - large paper works cut into strips and hung away from the wall to resemble blinds.

Viewers could see them as both drawings and interactive objects.

Banner's work encompasses sculpture, drawing and installation and text is still a 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 the brutal and the sensual, performing an almost complete cycle of intimacy and alienation.

"Each sculpture represents a full stop from a different font, such as Courier, Nuptial, Blippo, Zapf, Chancery and Century. They each have the same point (pt) size but the expanded scale reveals the anomalies latent within an apparently universal and uniform symbol.

In the context of the More London development, the sculptures create an abstract encounter with language. The Full Stops function as abstract sculptures with or without their reference to language and punctuation. For More London, the forms selected are chosen to mirror the surrounding architecture of the development, the new GLA building and Tower Bridge. The sculptures cause one to pause, stop, carry on.

The sculptures literally articulate the space - scattered as if fallen from a big conversation, the five Full Stops punctuate the long causeway. People walk amongst them like letters, in an abstract narrative."

Banner has used pornographic film to explore sexuality and the extreme limits of written communication. In the works shown in the exhibition, she transcribes the activities taking place in Arsewoman in Wonderland, an X-rated version of Alice's fictional adventures.

In sculptures and drawings, Banner shows massively enlarged full stops, presenting them as bold distinct shapes. For this exhibition, they also function as seating or objects to lean against, paralleling their role within language. Banner consistently turns to these works as a way of dealing with the elusiveness of true expression through words.

Fiona Banner is fascinated by the near impossibility of containing action and time in a prescribed form. She is best known for making hand-written and printed texts 'wordscapes' or 'still films', that retell in her own words entire feature films or sequences of events These personal transcriptions, which began in 1994 with the film Top Gun, also highlight the way in which actual or imagined events are fictionalised and mythologised. In a recent body of work based on Vietnam war films, Banner has deliberately posed questions about the fictionalisation of historical events.

In 1997 she published THE NAM (1997), a one thousand page book comprising her own frame by frame descriptions in continuous text of the Vietnam war movies Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Platoon. Her texts, representing eleven unbroken hours of harrowing film, hint at the excessive nature of imagery in our culture. When Banner asked a friend to read THE NAM he concluded that in its entirety it was 'unreadable'. This prompted Banner to make

Trance, a twenty hour, twenty-two cassette unabridged reading of the book in which the action movies unfold in an hypnotic stream of words.
The format of Banner's work is always carefully considered in relation to its content. For example, The desert (1994/95), Banner's retelling of David Lean's epic film Lawrence of Arabia, suggests the panoramic scale of a cinema screen, as well as the vast horizontal expanse of the desert.

You gota lot of nerve (1998) is inspired by Bob Dylan's classic song Positively 4th Street. With their accusatory use of the word 'you' Dylan's lyrics seem designed to address specific individuals on a widespread scale. The monumental scale of Banner's canvas, and the proximity of its confrontational words to the viewer, suggests that the 'you' in her text is directed personally to each visitor. Banner's rendering of the acrimonious words are incised into the canvas Ironically this leaves the canvas fragile and vulnerable -the biting words, which bear down on the viewer, are strangely hollow, existing only as negatives or shadows. In this way the artist alludes to what she perceives as the constant power struggle between words and their meaning. Banner is also interested in such seminal and iconic figures as Dylan, who never seem comfortable with celebrity and fail to live up to their own mythic image.
In a series of works based on the genre of the car chase, Banner succeeds in giving visual and literary form to a genre virtually found only in films. The most recent work in this series, Break Point, is based on the chase scene in Kathryn Bigelow's cult film Point Break (1991). The slogan featured in the advertisement for the film was, perhaps accurately in this case, '100% pure adrenalin'. Banner transforms and contains the nail-biting and seemingly endless chase into an arresting landscape of words. As the distance between pursuer and pursued closes, the space between the letters and lines of text stenciled on to the canvas in hazard red correspondingly collapses, until the climax of the chase ends in a crash of words at the bottom of the canvas. But significantly, the chase does not reach completion - when the pursuer finally catches his human quarry, he lets him get away.

In 1997 Banner exhibited a neon work in the shape of a full stop, 'the smallest neon in the world'. Following this she has made a group of enormously enlarged full stops carved in polystyrene. Although varying in size from about two to four and a half foot high they are all enlarged to scale from a variety of such fonts as Courier, Nuptial, Garamond, Blippo, Chancery, Century and Wing. They each have the same point size but the expanded scale reveals the curious anomalies latent within an apparently universal and uniform symbol.

These sculptures evolved from a group of large-scale pencil drawings of full stops in which Banner attempted to investigate the supposed immateriality or insignificance of a full stop. Sanded down, the white polystyrene sculptures have an illusory surface, their distorted ovoid shapes humorously mimicking the perfect forms of the sculptures of Brancusi. Placed on the floor rather than on plinths, the full stops have to be negotiated as physical objects. The artist has referred to the floor as thee bottom line'. In this sense visitors might be seen to function as letters mingling amongst the punctuation marks, giving meaning to the spaces between.
The full stop represents an ending but also signifies a beginning, an in between or a gap. Like the polystyrene, which is used as a packing material or 'space-filler', the full stop is transient. A full stop denotes the end, and in this sense these works relate to Banner's enduring fascination with the framing or definition of a subject. They also draw attention to the intelligent yet playful investigation of various forms of mark- making, which underpins much of her work.

Young British Artists or YBAs  also Brit artists and Britart  a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

Care For Your Art

Now that you have bought your art, you want to enjoy it. But how do you protect your investment and guarantee its preservation? We would like you to enjoy your art for years to come. Here are a few tips to keep in mind that will help conserve your fine artwork and maintain the integrity of its original state.

• Keep your art away from direct sunlight, as anything that will fade your carpet will fade your art. Be careful not to let direct sunlight shine on your art.
• Hang your art in neutral climates, away from excessive humidity or dryness. Too much moisture can cause mats and prints to buckle or mould over time. Extreme dryness can also unfavourably affect the artwork.
• Framing your artwork adds to the life of your art. Be sure to ask for 100% conservation materials when framing your art, such as cotton-rag mat board and acid-free backings. This combination results in the best long-term protection of your art.
• Keep an eye out for pollutants and contaminants in the environment. Art is just as susceptible to environmental damage as we are.
• Check your framed artwork about every 6 months, front and back, for signs of damage such as cracking and molding. There are paper conservators who may be able to repair any damage that has been done and help you with preventative maintenance for the future.
• Do not spray cleaner of any kind directly onto the framed piece. Rather, spray cleaner onto a cloth and then apply it to the glass or Plexiglas.
• If you are a renter, you may want to consider purchasing Renter’s Insurance. Landlords have insurance for the apartment building itself, but this does not cover your personal belongings within the building. Renter’s Insurance would cover the value of your artwork should anything happen to it.

If you are a homeowner, be assured that your artwork is included in your Homeowner’s Insurance. However, it is a good idea to take out a rider for artwork valued over £2,500.

Lighting For Your Art
How you light your artwork can dramatically influence its effect on your
room. Here are a few tips you might want to consider when lighting art:

• Do not hang your valuable artwork in direct sunlight. Even with protective UV-blocking glass, prolonged exposure to the suns heat can destroy your art.
• Fluorescent bulbs tend to fade images. Use incandescent bulbs to light your artwork instead. Incandescent lights have only 4% of their rays in the damaging range.
• Illuminate your art at the lowest light level possible for enjoyment.
• Choose subdued lighting effects that will not reflect into the glass, especially when you are not using a reflection control product.
• Aim track or cable lighting at the picture. You may need to adjust the light's angle a few times to place it in the optimum, glare-free position.
• Add a sense of atmosphere by using wall lights or sconces on either side of your framed piece.
• Set an inexpensive up light on the floor and aim its beam at the artwork.

Install a cylinder-shaped picture light (these are often made of brass) on the wall above the painting. Route the cord through the wall to keep it from looking unsightly against the wall.

Fiona Banner Bones painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

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Fiona Banner Table Stops painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

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