Vivienne Binns


Vivienne Joyce Binns is an Australian artist known for her contribution to the Women's Art Movement in Australia and her active advocacy within community arts. She works predominantly in painting and teaches at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Early life

Binns was born in Wyong, New South Wales, Australia, in 1940. For the first five years of her life, Binns were cared for by their mother, Joyce Binns, in the rural town of Young, NSW. Her father, Norman Binns enlisted in the army six months prior to Vivienne's birth and spent the majority of this five year period serving in the Middle East and Papua New Guinea. In 1945, following the end of the war, the Binns family returned to Sydney.
From 1953, Binns attended North Shore Sydney Girls High School. She later pursued her tertiary education in art at the National Art School from 1958 to 1962. After her graduation, Binns stayed on campus and took on a teaching role in the drawing department.

Career

Binns' first solo exhibition Vivienne Binns: Paintings and Constructions was held at Watters Gallery in Sydney in 1967.
In 1973 Binns worked as a field officer for the Community Arts Program, an Australia Council initiative, visiting regional areas to "investigate needs, resources and possibilities".
In 1979, she began her artist-in-residence program at the University of New South Wales, followed by artist-in-community placements in a range of locations across New South Wales from 1980 - 1988.
Binns was awarded an Australian Arts Creative Fellowship in 1990, which financed her three year research project about the cultural link between Australia and the Asia-pacific.
In 2000, she was resident in the Australia Council Studio London and, in 2001, again visited Europe assisted by an ANU Faculties Research Grant. This made it possible to pursue two aspects of her work; to continue research into Captain James Cooks journeys, and the work of artists who traveled with him, and to seek out contemporary work with a particular focus on surfacing and abstraction. Binns is currently represented by Bellas Gallery, Brisbane; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, and Helen Maxwell Gallery in Canberra. Her work is held in significant national and state collections throughout Australia.
Binns continues her practice and held her most recent solo exhibition It Is What It Is at the Sutton Gallery in Melbourne in 2018.
She lives in Canberra and is Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Australian National University, School of Art.

Awards

In 1983, Binns was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for Services to Art and Craft. She was also awarded the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary contribution to Community Arts in 1985.

Art practice

With an extensive career spanning over 50 years, Binns has worked across many media, including painting, printmaking, performance, sculpture and drawing. Her diverse range of artistic engagements has resulted in her being well respected amongst her Australian and global contemporaries, particularly within the feminist community.

Community art

Vivienne Binns was a prominent figure in the development of community arts in Australia. In 1972 Binns collaborated with Mike Morris and Tim Burns on The Artsmobile, a travelling community arts project that brought Dada and Surrealist style performance work to centres along the north east coast of NSW. Described as "the offspring of a marriage between Fluxus and a local town council bookmobile", the Artsmobile brought a variety of art-based activities to schools, seniors centres and public parks.
Continuing with her interest in community arts, Binns developed in 1978 during her artist's residency at the University of New South Wales. Beginning with staff and students of the University, Binns later expanded the project to the Sydney suburb of Blacktown where she worked closely with Patricia Parker, a community officer at the Blacktown City Council. Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories recalled the "lives of women and their means of expression in the domestic sphere", through facilitating a space where participants could come and share stories of the various craft and needlework skills that they had been taught from their mothers and other members of their family. Described as "dense, fragmented, multilayered" The final work was exhibited as a series of postcards installed on a postcard rack.
In 1983, Binns began work on her next major community art project Full Flight. Travelling and living in a caravan for two years in the Central West region of New South Wales, Binns stayed for 2 to 4 months in each town facilitating workshops, mural painting and skill sharing. This project celebrated "the creativity of ordinary people"
Binns' interest in community arts came primarily from an urge to make the art world accessible to everyone beyond the constraints of art institutions. Binns believed that creative expression was an inherent part of the human experience, and not allowing for this expression freely was a form of "social control".
"I am primarily interested in breaking down the distinctions between the art of artists and art institutions on one hand, and the art expression of people in general on the other...The approach I used was an attempt to take a positive step towards undermining the Australian cultural cringe and the oppressive effect of values pertaining to separate, aloof and elite art forms.
In 1991, Binns was the general editor of Community and the Arts: History, Theory, Practice, a collection of essays which served as a "theoretical text for community practitioners in the arts".

Women's art movement

Alongside feminist contemporaries such as Barbara Hall, Frances Phoenix, Beverley Garlick, Jude Adams and Toni Robertson, Binns was at the forefront of the development of The in Sydney. Beginning in 1973 and inspired by Linda Nochlin’s essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", WAM aimed to address discrimination and sexism within the art world through various actions and exhibitions. WAM was particularly dedicated to the documentation of women's artwork through the development of the Women's Art Register.
Feminism and the Women's Art Movement serves as a political undercurrent for much of Binns practice:

Painting

Throughout the span of her practice, Vivienne Binns has developed a strong reputation for her prolific approach to painting. Binns’ first solo exhibition Vivienne Binns: Paintings and Constructions, was held in 1967 at Watters Gallery in Sydney. Including notable works such as and , this exhibition has been recognised as a key starting point for the development of feminist art in Australia. This exhibition was one of the first of its kind, predating Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party and "critically affirming the power of women's sexuality whilst also provoking... a good measure of castration anxiety amongst the patriarchy".
Through decades of experimentation with colour and form, Binns' has conceptually explored ideas ranging from feminism to colonial critique within her painting practice. Binns utilises abstraction as a way to communicate complex ideas and make them accessible to a broader audience.

Exhibition List

Binns has been a part of countless exhibitions spanning her fifty years of art practice, most notably:
Solo Exhibitions
In Memory of the Unknown Artist and Others, Watters Gallery, Sydney  
TRANSLATIONS: Remembering Unknown Artists, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane
Rocks and Relics: Cook to Lake Cargelligo, The Cube, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra  
Group Exhibitions
The Artsmobile Project, Grafton and Woollongong, NSW