Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press: Our need to calibrate nature’s beauty – aestheticise it in human terms – has detached us from it in a way that has enabled us to exploit it

Fiona Banner, also known as The Vanity Press, is a British artist whose work explores the limits of language and the myths we build around power. Her early pieces took the form of ‘wordscapes’ – dense transcriptions of war films, pornos and historical events, written out in her own words. She’s since published herself as a book, installed decommissioned fighter jets in Tate Britain, and made monumental sculptural full stops. Some now rest on the seabed in protest at industrial fishing; another was delivered to DEFRA, with Greenpeace. In this conversation, Banner talks about conflict, control, the false clarity of the picturesque – and why she sees all art as a form of activism.

Obviously language is, in and of itself, intended to be a connector – but it's both brilliant and appalling in that mission. I think all the time about the inability of language to connect. Being enlivened to that has been a key driver.

My relationship with language has become more and more physical over time. Feeling the weight – the physical, emotional, intellectual freight – of language, I have tried to – or circumstances have led me to – use it in a very active way, in a very physical way, and at times in an absurdist way, perhaps deploying humour as a sort of release or lubricant along the way. There are particular projects in which that's more evident than others, but it's always the driver.

I don’t try to make sense of the world or describe it through my work. I try to offer up or imagine alternative possibilities, however absurd or obvious. And I think that’s what perhaps all art does. I don’t think that’s a passive thing; in itself, it’s quite an active thing. 

Nature itself is a complex social issue.

That same energy – of physical, active engagement – carries over into how I think about nature. We happen in nature as humans, whether that’s within urban environments or in a more rural, or pastoral, idealised version of the natural world. Yet nature itself is a complex social issue. We've eulogised and idealised ‘nature’ endlessly – imaged it endlessly, mimicked it in film and literature, but perhaps particularly in art – and yet, at the same time, we've developed a very extractive, incompatible relationship with it.

There’s a lot in the notion of landscape as always being somewhere else – ideas around the picturesque and affiliations with ownership. I often think about the ha-ha as a place where actual life is happening within nature but is invisible to the privileged view. We go back to Capability Brown and all of those concepts of idealised image-nature, and that is not what nature is. Nature is something complex and messy and volatile. Perhaps our need to calibrate nature’s beauty, our need to to aestheticise it in human terms, has detached us from it in a way that has enabled us to exploit it more.

Our obsession – our human obsession – with ownership has played into a conflict with nature and each other. We name fighter planes after forces of nature – Tornado, Typhoon, Hawk. The concept of nature as omnipotent is something that we have, I suppose, masculinised and used as we've remodelled nature around our own conceptual image. We've repurposed it – in a violent way.

But I think we can reimagine that relationship – we must reimagine it. To me, it's not an empathy issue – at least not within the terms of people that think about nature. It's a behavioural issue, and that probably goes for every single one of us. It's understanding, in a way, practical and notional. And I feel that’s a major problem – that changing behaviours is not something that is often discussed at a big level, at a high level, on a truly political level or even a personal one – in any meaningful way.

That question of action, of intervention, also shaped the decision to place the Full Stop sculptures on the seabed. But I didn’t really see it as a campaign, more a continuation of a sculptural practice. It was a way of deploying the work in a different context. In this case, those sculptures exist on the seabed – for squid not quid…they are sculptures with a porpoise…  and the seabed is, in many ways, the bottom line. It had a similar energy to much of what I do – but it was a very physical, direct, interventionist work.

How we measure the impact of work is perhaps not our business. As an artist, I think all you can do is do what you want to do as directly and with as much clarity as you can. In terms of that particular piece, it ended in this long, drawn-out battle, and in that case, Greenpeace and my work won. It was thrown out of court – the High Court said, you and the government should be working together on this, not against each other. Because it was the government taking the legal action. That area of Dogger Bank is now marked as off-limits for bottom-trawling. But that is such a tiny – if you excuse the pun – drop in the ocean.

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Orator Full Stop, 2020 Deployment view of work being placed in the North Sea’s. Dogger Bank by Greenpeace UK activists aboad the Esperanza. Courtesy the Artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

So it goes back to how things last – how things exist in your memory. And I think that’s sometimes where the conundrum that is art, can be powerful: in that it’s outside of industry, and it’s outside of any particular conventional practice, in this case outside of a world that is visible to humans.

There’s a sort of schism in what’s happening in the art world

In many ways, the role of the artist is changing against itself, because art has become increasingly market-adjacent – and that is not serving it. Art has always responded to conflict. But I think, actually, in many ways, it’s becoming more escapist and perhaps less political.  

The arts are there to challenge their own conventions. The market is there to serve conventions. So there’s a sort of schism in what’s happening in the art world.

I’m just finishing off some work around the concept of “Disarm” – a series of projects featuring different parts of the body – “arsenal” on a mannequin’s arse, “disarm” on a mannequin’s arm –  delegation, allegation on legs… as they fly through the air colliding. Referencing the body and also the body politic. That’s bringing some sort of physicality, and also potentially some dark visceral humour to the conversation. AI is disembodying language –but it is still of us. 

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, DISARM (landscape), 2024 (Film still). Courtesy the Artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

More recently I made a piece called DISARM (landscape) 2024, which connects with the idea of a benign landscape and performed violence. It’s shot overlooking a London park. It’s a conventional, jingoistic, highly egotistical flypast – violent murmuration, extreme weather –  the flight paths culminate in the aircraft flying in formation, spelling out “Disarm.” Performing their own emasculation, or hopelessness.

Those planes are all named after nature, and they’re from different, non-allied countries. They wouldn’t, in any usual setting, be flying together and definitely not performing this sentiment.

So that’s another bit of working with language in action – taking the flypast as a very extreme performance, a very public performance, and reengineering it. Or re-engendering it.

For me, all art is activism.

This conversation took place on 24 April 2025 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

So What Now?

The ‘So What Now’ section is part of The Skylark’s mission to highlight partner organisations driving action on climate and nature. Interviewees are not affiliated with, nor do they necessarily endorse, these partners.