Fiona Banner

The exhibition demonstrates Banner’s on-going fascination with language and how it appears around us in the urban environment. In her new works, she continues to examine the relationship between words and imagery, language and experience.

The ground floor galleries are scattered with 3 dimensional insults, a list of slurs compiled by the artist from personal experience. For Banner these terms of frustration and exasperation have an immediacy or liveliness, they signify disappointment, they’re infantile, they’re the opposite of love, occurring in the moments before language breaks down, their blunt sentiment is echoed in the work’s very basic mode of production.

In the basement the artist has recorded her voice on a lacquer disk – the kind used as a ‘mother disk’ from which vinyl copies are pressed. The reading is based on the porn movie Arsewoman in Wonderland, it is neither a description nor a blow by blow account, but rather the ultimate shaggy dog story, half imagined, half real. As the soft lacquer disk wears out through constant play the recorded words grow increasingly indistinct until they finally become completely unintelligible.

The large graphite work Black Blind takes the form of a walk-in drawing or space confuser, like the curtain screening off the x-rated section in a video store. This intensely worked pencil drawing is slashed to form a vertical blind. The many lines of which it is comprised are consumed by the sheer scale to become a physical entity. The silvery surface is elusive and untouchable, yet seductive, its silky sheen reminiscent of hair.

Two neons – Spell 1 and Spell 2 – are made from the smashed words of discarded neon signs. Because it contains a mixture of highly toxic gases and chemicals this fragile material once broken is seldom repaired. Here they have been reformed into shapes reminiscent loops or thought bubbles they regenerate language both physically and metaphorically.