Fiona Banner: Stop
For its final show of the millennium, Frith Street Gallery is pleased to present a show of Full Stops by Fiona Banner. The end of the century. Full Stop.
Best known for her ‘Wordscapes’ or ‘Still Films’ which are densely verbal descriptions of entire films, Banner’s recent drawings deal in words without saying anything. She has described them as being like ‘totally edited’ books.
Punctuation marks usually draw little attention from the reader – yet they provide the act of reading with its very structure. They punctuate and, by default, interrupt the free flow of words in speech or writing. They are the objects that end every sentence – mute, dumb, speechless objects – which Banner has enlarged to giant proportions, investigating the supposed immateriality or insignificance of this mark.
'It was the idea of a finality. I was thinking of the nature of full stops: are there different kinds of full stops? Is there a full stop that just goes errrrrm ? A full stop is the ultimate mark due to the total brevity of it, or due to the fact that it’s a stab. It’s a mark that alludes to nothing; it is a mark that is a thing in itself… It has no subject and yet is not abstract.' – Fiona Banner
Enlarged by Banner to 1800pt size, these abstract forms, taken from many different font styles, develop an expressive, dramatic, humorous life of their own. Each full stop is highly individual, at this giant size their differences are plain. In her show they stand on either side of Don’t Look Back, Banner’s resplendent 3 part memory of D. A. Pennebaker’s legendary documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 British tour. Printed in black on silver to match the chiaroscuro of Pennebaker’s documentary, the posters could be three stages. The viewer is simultaneously the audience, staring up at the stage, and the performer confronted by a vast field of letters looking out of the print like a crowd of spectators.
In the next gallery, her sculptures literally punctuate the gallery space while her pencil drawings can be seen as arrests of a different type. Rendered through repetitive mark making, the forms themselves – like massive crossings out – are part reflective, part black hole. Like ridiculous ends to sentences never uttered, they shout STOP in the face of the passing viewer.
