Biography of Fiona Banner
Before her 1998 Tate Britain exhibition, leading British conceptual artist and sculptor Fionna Banner (born in 1966 in Merseyside, UK) was most well known for her “wordscapes”, large-scale text works that recount the plots of feature films and other events. Her use of the visually numbing, barely legible text echoes the desensitizing feeling produced by many feature films and the fictionalizing devices used to frame historical events. Toward the end of the 90s her focus shifted towards punctuation and its qualities as abstracted marks. By utilizing enlarged computer fonts and rendering them three-dimensionally in polystyrene, the symbols become dramatically minimal objects that call attention to the pause amidst the noise.
Fiona Banner’s work is represented in many collections in the UK & abroad including The Arts Council of England; Tate Gallery, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis and the Philadelphia Museum. In 2002 Banner was short-listed for the Turner Prize.
