Vivienne Binns

Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM (born 1940) 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.

Vivienne Binns

OAM
Born
Vivienne Joyce Binns

1940 (age 79–80)
Wyong, New South Wales, Australia
NationalityAustralian
EducationNational Art School
AwardsOrder of Australia Medal (1983)

Early life

Binns was born in Wyong, New South Wales, Australia, in 1940. For the first five years of her life, Binns (along with her five older siblings) 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. [1]

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".[2]

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. [3]

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.[2]

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.[4]

Binns continues her practice and held her most recent solo exhibition It Is What It Is at the Sutton Gallery in Melbourne in 2018. [5]

She lives in Canberra and is Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Australian National University, School of Art.[6]

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. [1]

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. [7]

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"[8], 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 Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories 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[9]. Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories recalled the "lives of women and their means of expression in the domestic sphere", [10] 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, [and] multilayered" [11]The final work was exhibited as a series of postcards installed on a postcard rack.[12]

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"[8]

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".[13]

"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. [13]

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". [14]

Women's art movement

Alongside feminist contemporaries such as Barbara Hall, Frances Phoenix (nee Budden), Beverley Garlick, Jude Adams and Toni Robertson, Binns was at the forefront of the development of The Women’s Art Movement (WAM) in Sydney[15]. 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.[16] 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:

"as a feminist I became aware that the heritage of women was not readily available to us, was not obviously recorded and was certainly not taught in the schools."[17]

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 Vag Dens and Phallic Monument, this exhibition has been recognised as a key starting point for the development of feminist art in Australia [18]. 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".[19]

Through decades of experimentation with colour and form, Binns' has conceptually explored ideas ranging from feminism to colonial critique within her painting practice.[18] Binns utilises abstraction as a way to communicate complex ideas and make them accessible to a broader audience.[20]

Exhibition List [21][1]

Binns has been a part of countless exhibitions spanning her fifty years of art practice, most notably:

Solo Exhibitions

  • 1967 Paintings and Constructions, Watters Gallery, Sydney
  • 1971 Funky Enamel Ashtrays, Watters Gallery, Sydney  
  • 1973 Enamel Panels, University of Tasmania, Hobart and Raffins Gallery, Orange  
  • 1985 Watters Gallery, Sydney  
  • 1990 Drawings of God, Tower of Babel, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane  
  • 1992 Sutton Gallery, Melbourne  
  • 1994 Surfacing in the Pacific, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane
  • 1995 Pacific Strands, Australian Girls’ Own Gallery (aGOG), Canberra  
  • 1996 Slicing History in the Pacific, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane  

In Memory of the Unknown Artist and Others, Watters Gallery, Sydney  

  • 1999 PATTERNING: In Memory of Unknown Artists, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne  

TRANSLATIONS: Remembering Unknown Artists, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane

Rocks and Relics: Cook to Lake Cargelligo, The Cube, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra  

  • 2004 Vivienne Binns: Twenty First Century Paintings, curated by Merryn Gates, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney  
  • 2005 Some New, Some Old, Some Collaborations, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne  
  • 2006-8 Vivienne Binns, touring exhibition curated by Merryn Gates, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; The Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra; Penrith Regional Gallery, Penrith, NSW; and Bathurst Regional Gallery, Bathurst, NSW  
  • 2008 Everything New is Old Again, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
  • 2012 Vivienne Binns, Art and Life (mini –Survey), Curated by Dr Penny Peckham, La Trobe University Museum of Art, Melbourne  
  • 2018 It is what it is what it is, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne  

Group Exhibitions

  • 1971 Woom, environmental lightshow with Roger Foley (Ellis D Fogg), Watters Gallery, Sydney  
  • 1972 The Jo Bonomo Story - A Show of Strength, a group happening, Watters Gallery, Sydney  

The Artsmobile Project, Grafton and Woollongong, NSW  

  • 1980 Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories, Blacktown artist in community and participation project, Watters Gallery, Sydney; Ewing and George Paton Galleries, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne  
  • 1981 Australian Perspecta, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney  
  • 1981-83 Full-Flight, artist-in-community in the central western region of NSW (the region covers approximately 60,000 square miles with 40-50 towns)  
  • 1982 Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney  
  • 1987 Contemporary Art in Australia-A Review, Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane  
  • 1991 Frames of Reference: Aspects of Feminism and Art, Pier 4/5, Sydney  
  • 1996 Women Hold Up Half the Sky: The Orientation of Art in the Post-War Pacific, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne
  • 1997 I had a Dream: Australian Art in the 1960s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne  
  • 1998 Patterning: Layers of Meaning in Contemporary Art, curated by Merryn Gates, an Asialink touring exhibition to Canberra; Bandung, Jakarta, Ubud, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; Lahore, Pakistan; and Manila, Philippines  
  • 2000 On the Brink: Abstraction in the 90’s, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne  
  • 2007 Cross Currents: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney  
  • 2012 Sixties Explosion, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney  
  • 2014 Binns + Valamanesh, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney  
  • 2015 Pop to Popism, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney  
  • 2017-18 Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art & Feminism, ACCA, Melbourne

Collections [21]
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References
  1. Burke, Janine (1990). Field of vision : a decade of change, women's art in the seventies. Ringwood, Vic. : Viking. ISBN 9780670835867.
  2. Peckham, Penny (November 2006). "Vivienne Binns: Biography". Vivienne Binns. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery: 30–41.
  3. Burke, Janine (1990). Field of vision : a decade of change, women's art in the seventies. Ringwood, Vic. : Viking. ISBN 9780670835867.
  4. ANCA Artist Profile – Vivienne Binns, Australian National Capital Artists, Inc.
  5. "It is what it is what it is". Sutton Gallery. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
  6. Staff: School of Art, Australian National University, 2010.
  7. Binns, Vivienne, 1940- (2006). Vivienne Binns. Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery. ISBN 0977533417. OCLC 123942647.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. Kunda, Maria (2006). "The artist, the community, the land". Vivienne Binns: 16–21.
  9. Binns, Vivienne (1980). "'Mother's memories, other's memories': A project combining creative expression, memorabilia and oral history". Oral History Association of Australia Journal, The (3): 54.
  10. Binns, Vivienne (1980). "Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories". Lip. 80: 38–45 – via ISBN 9780003134285.
  11. Burke, Janine (1984). "Collaboration: Artists working collectively". Anything Goes. Art in Australia 1970-1980. ART & TEXT: 122–131.
  12. "Mothers' Memories Others' Memories ; Binns, Vivienne; 1980; BCC BNS 001 on eHive". eHive. Retrieved 4 October 2019.
  13. Binns, Vivienne (1980). "'Mother's memories, other's memories': A project combining creative expression, memorabilia and oral history". Oral History Association of Australia Journal, The (3): 54.
  14. Binns, editor of compilation.), Vivienne (1991). Community and the arts : history, theory, practice. Leichhardt, N.S.W. : Pluto Press. ISBN 9780949138569.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  15. Kenyon, Therese. (1995). Under a hot tin roof : art, passion and politics at the Tin Sheds Art Workshop. Power Publications. ISBN 0730589331. OCLC 957035962.
  16. Adams, Jude (1 November 2013). "Looking from with/in: feminist art projects of the 70s". Outskirts: feminisms along the edge. Retrieved 3 October 2019.
  17. Binns, Vivienne (1980). "'Mother's memories, other's memories': A project combining creative expression, memorabilia and oral history". The Oral History Association of Australia Journal (3): 54.
  18. Clark, Deborah (2006). "The Painting of Vivienne Binns". Vivienne Binns. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery: 8–15.
  19. Delany, Max (2017). "Unfinished Business". Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art: 12–17.
  20. Dean, Christopher (2006). "Vivienne Binns' Language of Abstraction". Vivienne Binns. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery: 26–29.
  21. "Vivienne Binns Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Sutton Gallery. 2018.
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