Virginia Button, curator of the Art Now series, compares them, not entirely fancifully, with Brancusi. “Maybe that was why I looked around London and suddenly saw that it was full of neon words, but no neon full stops. I went down to a sign shop, and they agreed: there aren’t any. So I set about designing one.” This Ur-stop, hailed as the world’s smallest neon installation, was exhibited in a show at London’s Frith Street Gallery last summer.The Tate Full Stops are actually rather beautiful. “It’s what a novelist friend had said to me: you can imagine how pleased I was.

So I decided to make this thing, sorry, this work, this mighty work, called Trance, in which I read my apparently unreadable book on tape.” Banner pauses defiantly “On 22 tapes, actually Hah! It’s a Joycean thing.”And the full stops? Ah yes. “Producing Nam had been something of an epic, so its end seemed like a culminative moment, a full stop,” says Banner. “Then it came to me: ‘The Nam: It’s Unreadable!’ ” She chuckles. (“They spill out of the helicopters like they can’t wait to be on land again Other choppers come in, they land shakily, on a rut. The sound of gunfire can be heard in between the sound of the blades bat bat batting.” And so on, and on, and on.) “I kept wondering what kind of publicity to put on fly-posters,,” Banner says thoughtfully.

“I discovered one called Fantasy Subterfuge Overlay the other day,” says Banner, with the glint of a lepidopterist bagging a new variant of Cabbage White. “It was very exciting.”
Consider the pedigree of Full Stops, and you will see how her father might have developed a certain wistfulness towards bronze. Last year, Banner published a book called The Nam: a thousand-page, two kilogramme work which lists, in unbroken narrative, the artist’s recollection of various Vietnam films: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter. Fiona Banner’s sculptures – her first, if you exclude a pair of mirrored sunglasses with the lenses turned back to front (“Like kissing yourself,” muses their maker), are made of Styrofoam. When the young conceptual artist announced that she had been given her own show in the Tate Gallery’s Art Now series, Mr Banner timidly asked his daughter what she intended to include. Banner’s sculpture series, created specially for the Tate show, is entitled Full Stops, because that that is exactly what it is: a sequence of full stops, taken from type fonts including Courier, Century and Wing, and blown up enormously in three dimensions. “So I said, ‘It’s the Tate, Dad: you know, paintings and sculpture.’” Her father’s relief was obvious.

“He said, ‘Oh: you mean …” – Banner hoots with laughter – “you mean .. bronze?”

Well, no. Religious traditionalists felt the historical record they provided was a substantial riposte to the Darwinian arguments that were undermining the authority of the Bible.Eastnor Castle, Ledbury (01531 633160), is open Sun-Fri to 31 Aug; and Sun only to 4 Oct.. You can’t help feeling sympathy for Fiona Banner’s father. “Imagine a labyrinth of chambers,” he wrote, “leading one into another by entrances formed sometimes by gigantic human-headed lions or bulls, and others by winged mythological figures The chambers are constructed with slabs of limestone … It eventually sold at Christies for pounds 7m.The battle scenes shown in relief on the wall panels caused a sensation in Victorian Britain when Layard brought them home because they were thought to prove the historical authenticity of the Old Testament. Four years ago one of the Guests’ panels was memorably revealed under layers of whitewash in the school tuck shop.

“He later made a gift of two panels to Lord Eastnor and gave others to Lady Charlotte Guest, who lived at Canford Manor in Dorset – now run as a private school. “You have to climb up through a hole in the cellar to get in.”Sent from the site of the dig at Nineveh, the letter described how Layard had excavated buried Assyrian palaces and unearthed hundreds of ancient artefacts. In an ante-chamber stuffed with old documents, Imogen found a letter which put the archaeological history of the Assyrian panels in its proper context. Dated 6 April,1847, it was addressed to her ancestor Charles Somers, Viscount Eastnor, and had come from his old friend Charles Layard, the explorer and archaeologist.