Fiona Banner, also working under the name of The Vanity Press, puts text and publishing at the centre of her practice. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2002, her work spans a broad range of media including sculpture, film, installation, performance and drawing. Deeply engaged intellectually while at times playful, Banner’s practice reveals an ongoing fascination with military hardware and subjects relating to conflict, such as fighter jets, the Vietnam War and Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.
Runway Show (2017) consists of a poem referencing the fashion world’s (mis)use of young women, printed on a piece of aircraft fuselage. The text describes a model in a runway show, and through its title conflates the idea of an aircraft landing strip with the idea of a a performance space. Runway Show was exhibited in Banner’s recent exhibition Runway AW17 at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, Netherlands, where the artist created a theatrical mise-en-scène in which gigantic helicopter rotor blades and re-purposed parts of military aircraft played a central role.
The Victoria Gallery & Museum, University of Liverpool holds a range of collections that link to the University’s history and its current academic focus, which includes a specialism in aerospace engineering. Merseyside-born Banner was elected a Royal Academician in 2018, so it is especially fitting that this honour is marked by an important acquisition of her work for Liverpool.
