Fiona Banner @ Frith Street Gallery

In her exhibition P E R I O D, Fiona Banner Aka the Vanity Press reflects on three years of uncertainty and suspended animation for the British Isles. The central concern of her practice is the exploration of language and communication, with the focus on its breakdown.

In this exhibition she uses figurative painting, and presents a series of interventions into found genre paintings; seascapes. In these works, she painted-out the original subject, mighty seafaring vessels, battleships and destroyers, replacing them instead with black, oil-painted full stops.

To coincide with the exhibition, the artist published a new book also titled P E R I O D, which riffs on the American vernacular for the full stop – a title that links the gendering of objects and mediums, and language with the idea of cycles of time, the body, and specific ‘historical’ periods.