Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press explores gender, language, and conflict through a range of media, including drawing, sculpture, performance and the moving image. She considers the meaning of the body politic and the politics of the body through a playful questioning of language.
The exhibition is entered through a work The channel. A verbal description of the Bayeux Tapestry, which Banner describes as ‚the first ever war film‘. Written on a helicopter blade which bisects the entrance, it acts as both entry point to the gallery and a possible barrier.
Poems for Helicopter Blades unfolds through a series of new video and sound sculptures constructed around parts of fighter aircraft. La Fin / Runway is projected onto the canopy of a Jaguar aircraft, which formed part of her acclaimed 2010 installation Harrier and Jaguar, featuring fighter jets installed in the massive neoclassical galleries at Tate Britain. Post exhibition the body of the aircraft were melted down and stored as aluminium ingots – they feature here recast as sculptures and picture frames.
La Fin / Runway, draws on images from Banner’s 2021 photo shoot for Vogue Korea. Working with long-term collaborator, photographer Emma Summerton, the film features the artist herself, her teenage daughter and artist model Evangeline Ling, posing as military aircraft, a Falcon and Typhoon, contemporary fighter planes active on the world stage today and also forces of nature – a bird of prey and an awesome, increasingly destructive wind. The posturing human-beast-automatons propose a melding with nature and at the same time a tender, sad, euphoric loss. Falcon and Typhoon pose a fantasy of emasculating the tools of conflict, as they play out an unrequited desire for intimacy over alienation.
Using a photographic aesthetic associated with couture and the fashion industry La Fin / Runway explores our need to imagine ourselves through tropes of luxury and territory – ultimately through conflict.
The grandiose soundtrack emanates from Speaker Fin, a mirror-polished tail fin of from a Harrier Jet. Recorded by Banner and friends the track draws on Swan Lake, evoking nature and procreation. It recalls the peripatetic nature of a magazine, conjuring wind, seduction and violence.
Pas de Deux, Tip and Toe, rotor blades from a Gazelle Helicopter, are suggestive of humans, animals and totems. Upended, the blades appear to balance on tip toes, perhaps giant legs. Designed to spin laterally, vertically they perform a sort of sculptural ballet.
The two sculptures double as publications. Registered as books under their own ISBN numbers, which the artist painted onto them and then published under titles Tipand Toe, a reference to their, and our, precarity.
Recto Verso / Books From Other is a series of sculptural paintings – texts on slicedrotor blades.
Elsewhere Vulva Volvo (2025) is based on a text/poem by Banner that plays with the shared etymology of the two words. A wry look at the commodification of language, the piece attempts to re-engender the word and re-route ‘the conspiracy of the linear notion of time and space’.
Flypast (2026), a delicate photogravure, subverts the absurd ego of military flypasts which Banner describes as ‘a raw moment of extreme weather; a violent murmuration’ making it a natural phenomenon performed by birds.
As in much of Banner’s work, the military object is stripped of its functional purpose and subjected to a process of linguistic and material displacement. What remains areunstable object, sounds and images caught between machine and sculpture, weapon and image, body and language.
