We are honoured to present Poems for Helicopter Blades by Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, a founding member of the gallery.
In Poems for Helicopter Blades, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press continues to explore language, conflict and gender through a range of media. The exhibition unfolds through a series of new video and sound sculptures constructed around parts of fighter aircraft.
The film La Fin / Runway projected onto the cockpit windscreen of a Jaguar aircraft , recalls the innocence of early cinema more than the uber-tech of contemporary warfare. The screen was once the huge eye of Jaguar XZ118, which formed part of Banner’s 2010 installation Harrier & Jaguar, featuring two fighter jets installed in the neoclassical galleries at Tate Britain. Post-exhibition, Banner melted the main body of both aircraft and stored them as aluminium ingots, the material comes back elsewhere in the exhibition, recast into sculpture and frames.
Within La Fin / Runway, a small cast, including Banner and her teenage daughter, pose as and with two inflatable aircraft, a Falcon and Typhoon. Playing out on the small theatre of a catwalk, merging a magazine shoot, a theatrical fashion space and a landing site for aircraft – a strange parody of the spaces of fashion and universal conflict emerges. Humans act out as aircraft and aircraft as beasts in an absurd ballet – creatures of the page as much as the wind, they seem stuck in a story of seduction, conflict, loss and hope.
The film draws on images from Banner’s 2021 photo shoot for Vogue Korea, where with long-term collaborator, photographer Emma Summerton, she used the magazine as a droll post-human performance space, using inflatable aircraft as stand-ins for costume and prop. Falcon and Typhoon, contemporary fighter planes active on the world stage today, are also forces of nature – a bird of prey and an awesome, increasingly destructive wind. The posturing human-beast-automatons perform a melding with nature and at the same time a tender, sad, euphoric loss of it. They pose a fantasy of emasculating the tools of conflict, as they play out an unrequited desire for intimacy over alienation – absurdly dramatizing the small theatre of a photo shoot / magazine page / runway.
The soundtrack for La Fin / Runway emanates from Speaker Fin, a mirror-polished tail fin from a Harrier jet turned audio speaker. The track heightens a surreal sense of desire, conflict, and lost aspiration, as it veers from the vulnerable to the grandiose, summoning the bathos of the runway, a forlorn stage. Recorded by the artist and friends, it draws obliquely on Wild is the Wind and Swan Lake, evoking the human/bird/doppelganger interplay of the ballet, as it recalls the peripatetic, ephemeral nature of a magazine.
Banner is known for her iconoclastic and playful attitude to publishing, in 2009 she issued herself with an ISBN number and registered herself as a publication, ‘a sort of ongoing performance about the myth of biography’. Here, a new publication, Pas de Deux, (Tip Toe) incorporates two rotor blades from a Gazelle helicopter, positioned vertically, they are suggestive of humans, animals and totems. Designed to spin laterally, upended, they appear to balance on tip toes, as such they perform a sort of sculptural ballet. The blades double as publications, with their own ISBN numbers painted on them, they are published by The Vanity Press under titles Tip and Toe – a reference to their, and our, precarity.
Mortal Coil is the artists most recent publication. A performative gallery guide, it is an object as much as a text, which gradually unwinds and undoes as pieces are torn off and read. It incorporates an absurdist piece of live writing with novelist Tom McCarthy, in which Tom and Fiona assume the overblown posturing (and deflation) of the protagonists of the film, also a T and an F (Tornado and Falcon).
Books From Other are a series of sculptural paintings – texts on sliced rotor blades, that present as single pages and spreads. The texts reference the form of the blades, redolent of the gutter / margin of the page and also the curves of the body.
VULVA VOLVO (1930–2021) is a sculpture based on an extended text/poem which riffs on the shared etymology of the two words. Banner edited the text to a single word, ‘vulva’, carved and cast to emulate the iconic Volvo font–a wry look at the commodification of language, and an attempt to re-gender the word and re-route the conspiracy of the linear notion of time and space. Sand cast in recycled aircraft aluminium from metal from Jaguar, now rebirthed as a word, primal, elemental. Vulva Volvo is a series of graphite drawings that also reference Volvo typography from different eras. The drawings reference a slippage of language and also draw on the silver/graphite they are made from, its mineral content and its industrial purpose as a lubricant – as if proposing the possibility of lubricating a language that has calcified into its opposite.
Banner describes the painting Disarm, Disarm as ‘a gravity-defiant concrete poem – which is actually more fluid than concrete’. It refers to parts of the body as well as to the body politic, depicting two arms, tattooed with the word Disarm, as they float through space. The painting held, in an artist’s frame, made from stored and recast aluminium from Harrier ZE695, is also a sculpture. Like the word Disarm itself, the frame is perhaps naïve, unstable… vulnerable. The word Disarm is again spelt out this time by birds, in 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 are unstable objects, sounds and images caught between machine and sculpture, weapon and image, body and language.
Emma Summerton is a photographer. She has over 50 Vogue covers to her name and is one of the few women to shoot the Pirelli Calendar.
Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His new novel, The Rhyl Poster, is published in October 2026.
