Sleep (ISBN 0-9543866-8-5)

This artwork featured in Never Judge a Book (2016). 

Banner founded her own publishing company, The Vanity Press, not only to publish her own works but also to explore ideas of legitimacy or authorship linked to books and publishing. In that spirit, she published herself as an individual ISBN number under the title ‘Fiona Banner’. She encountered a fascinating dilemma when, in accordance with the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act, she was asked to deposit a copy of all her publications in the British Library. In a similar spirit, the profoundly moving and meditative Sleep is a stone with its own ISBN number and is therefore an official edition in, and only of, itself.

Image: Fiona Banner, Sleep, stone, installation view, Never Judge a Book, Richard Booth’s Bookshop, 2016. Image courtesy Meadow Arts. Photography: Stephan Handy. 

 

About the artist

Fiona Banner

Fiona Banner exhibited in Building Site, Hardwick Hall, 2014, commissioned in part by Meadow Arts, and Never Judge a Book, Richard Booth’s Bookshop, 2016.

Image: Fiona Banner, Work III, 2014. Glass. Commissioned in part by Meadow Arts. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery.