Work III

This artwork featured in Building Site (2014). Commissioned in part by Meadow Arts.

Courtesy Frith Street Gallery.

“I spend a lot of time up scaffold towers during the making of large wall drawings, so the experience of being high up on a scaffold is intimately associated with process, the tension between the idea of the work and the completion of the work; between something not existing and existing, it’s a kind of fantasy space, it is a precarious moment. When the scaffold is gone I always miss it”.

Similarly the reality of art itself is often temporary – it is put up, installed, then stored or erased. Work 1 echoes the lean yet unintentional aesthetics of this structure, which combines maximum strength, with maximum temporality. Banner toys with the sense of vertigo embedded within such an architectural object, one which can morph and adjust to its given context or required function of physically lifting us from the ground.

By using glass to build that which is meant to support, Banner compounds the inherent fragility of the very medium she is using. Through it she provides us with a structure that plays at a game of opposites – it is present yet implies an absence, solid while also remaining transparent. A scaffold is a form that is associated with the preparation of an exhibition, the making of an artwork, yet it is always removed before the opening. Here the scaffold becomes the sculpture, the major exhibit itself.

Image: Fiona Banner, Work III, glass, 2014. Image courtesy the artist. 

 

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.