Fiona Banner. Buoys Boys

About

The exhibition, which takes place both inside and outside of the gallery, is a play on digital vs. material experiences.

Banner continues her Full Stop sculptures – a sequence of full stops from typefaces blown up to human scale, previously produced in polystyrene and bronze – reformed here as large inflatables.  They will be presented as a series of happenings around the Pavilion.  Full stops also feature in a vast window installation spanning the full length of the gallery, making illusory sculptural interventions, or Buoys, on the seascape beyond.

Banner says : "The full stop inflatables have the English Channel as backdrop. They are big black empty texts in one way, just floating buoys in another. There’s something beautiful but also dark about the channel, the only time Britain has been invaded was across this stretch of water in 1066, the same stretch that migrants are crossing today – it's what separates us from mainland Europe. Normally my work is verbally very dense, the full stop sculptures have the sense of a need to communicate in words but the impossibility of doing that sometimes."

The Vanity Press, Banner’s publishing wing, has been central to her practice since 1997.  In the gallery Banner uses www.thevanitypress.com as an interface to present film projects as a series of large projections.  The website, which is usually used to access an artist’s work when the work itself isn’t present, here becomes integral to the work.