Naked Witch: An Autobiography

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Fiona Allison’s has over a million followers and is best known for her sexy exotic photos and videos.

As a collection it embodies the history of manned flight and the development of an unwieldy military industry. Strikingly naked atop her majestic steed, she commands attention from all who pass by Great Windmill Street, just opposite the legendary Windmill Theatre. These unique prints and sculptures are editions in and only of themselves; editions of one – a book reduced to a reference, a purely imagined space. Her work explores how experiences are translated into language and the ways in which actual or imagined events are fictionalised and mythologised.

In the lower gallery are a series of books and prints selected from Banner’s own publishing imprint, The Vanity Press. The Vanity Press has also reissued three largely forgotten science fiction novels written by the founder of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, Fred T. She has said that these works are an attempt to describe something through close observation without the device of editing.

Collecting is a recurrent theme in Banner’s work, and she has compiled this collection over a period of twenty years. Every life drawing, good or bad, is like a gravestone, an attempt to make permanent that which is always passing, an attempt to seize what we can’t hold.Often using parts of military aircraft as the support for these descriptions, Banner juxtaposes the brutal and the sensual, performing an almost complete cycle of intimacy and alienation. Spilt Nude 2007 highlights Banner’s ongoing interest in not only the act of observation, but also the process of translation and the space between the subject and the object.

With both approaches Banner transcribes the object of her looking in a manner which in part resembles the processes that would be used for traditional figurative drawing, but with an end result in written rather than pictorial form. Banner’s source is The Bayeux Tapestry, the primary historical document of the event, in which the brutal engagement between the Normans and the Saxons unfolds like an early film. Banner’s print Superhuman Nude is taken from a nude study of a Paralympic athlete wearing a prosthetic leg. Her fascination with the English language led her to re-examine how history has represented the Battle of Hastings, an event which had a profound impact on the development of modern English.By entering this site you swear that you are of legal age in your area to view adult material and that you wish to view such material. Now as a very grounded, yet slightly implausible tower, the books have been transformed, through the simplest of means, from a library, list and collection into a piece of sculpture.

She recently turned her attention to the idea of the classic, art-historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing the pose and form in a similar vein to her earlier transcription of films. The contributing artists were Fiona Banner, Michael Craig-Martin, Martin Creed, Tracey Emin, Anthea Hamilton, Howard Hodgkin, Gary Hume, Sarah Morris, Chris Ofili, Bridget Riley, Bob and Roberta Smith and Rachel Whiteread. All publications registered with an ISBN must be deposited in the Legal Deposit Office of The British Library, yet the singularity of Banner’s project makes this impossible. It also refers to the elusive nature of description, the limiting as well as the communicating force of language and Banner’s interest in the harnessing of uncontained forces that spill out. For the past few years Banner has been producing one-off publications as part of a series about the way ideas are represented and circulated.

She has explained, ‘I thought it would be interesting to strip off all the narrative and the mediation of the film image, and just look at the figure. For Banner, bells signify the simplest form of communication – an instrument that requires no music; a language without words, yet with multiple and conflicting meanings. Furthermore this verbal encounter reflects her interest in the act of reading which draws together the processes of looking and meaning. Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft represents a shared knowledge, beyond political and national boundaries.