So Long Babe
Project Description
So Long Babe is a single-channel video work by British artist Georgina Starr (b. 1968, Leeds), in which the artist pilots a handcrafted, single-seater wooden plane across the London skyline. Accompanied by Nancy Sinatra’s 1960s song of the same name, the four-minute film combines whimsical artifice, cinematic imagery and handmade props to create a dreamlike journey between fantasy and reality.
The work forms part of Starr’s Starvision series, in which the artist constructs fictional personas and pop-cultural alter egos through sculpture, performance and moving image. Dressed in vintage flight gear, Starr appears as both aviator and protagonist, transforming herself into a comic-book figure whose heroic image is tempered by vulnerability and melancholy.
The video’s lo-fi visual effects and deliberately constructed environments give the work a sense of childlike sincerity, while Sinatra’s voice introduces a bittersweet emotional dimension. Flight becomes both a fantasy of escape and a playful response to constraint, with Starr creating an imagined world in which the artist becomes aviator, dreamer and author of her own mythology.
Starr’s wider practice combines video, sound, sculpture, drawing, photography, text and performance. Her emotionally charged installations explore identity, memory, the unconscious, femininity and the shifting boundaries between history and fiction. Through fictional characters, surreal narratives and references to mythology, occult symbolism and cinema, she creates elaborate psychological worlds that move between theatricality and the uncanny.
Bio
Georgina Starr (b. 1968, Leeds) is a British multidisciplinary artist whose practice emerged internationally in the 1990s. Working across film, video, installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, text and performance, Starr explores identity, memory, the unconscious, femininity and personal mythology.
Her work has been presented internationally at Tate Britain, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Kunsthalle Zürich; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and the Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions and projects include Outside the Circle at Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2024), The Discreet Dash at Good Press, Glasgow and Donlon Books, London (2025), and If I Had a Dream It Would Be a Good Dream with Paul Noble at The Gallery of Everything, London (2026). Her work is also included in YBA & Beyond: British Art in the 90s from the Tate Collection, touring Tokyo and Kyoto in 2026.
Project details
Year: 1997
Artist: Georgina Starr
Work: So Long Babe
Programme: UK/NY
Curated by: Film and Video Umbrella
Funding: Arts Council England
Format: Single-channel video
Country: United Kingdom