Vivienne Binns

Vivienne Joyce Binns (born 1940) is an Australian artist known for her contribution to the Women's Art Movement in Australia, her engagement with feminism in her artwork, and her active advocacy within community arts.

She works predominantly in painting.

Binns was born in Wyong, New South Wales, Australia, in 1940.

She was the youngest of five children of her parents Joyce and Norman.

Norman had enlisted in the army six months prior to Vivienne's birth and spent the majority of five years serving in the Middle East and Papua New Guinea, while Joyce and the children lived in Young, New South Wales.

In 1945, following the end of the war, the Binns family returned to Sydney, where Binns grew up, first in Willoughby then Wollstonecraft.

From 1953, Binns attended North 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.

She never conformed to traditional gender roles, and, during a time of "initial, intense, introversion", was questioning her sexuality as well as interrogating the philosophies and ideas in making art, in particular Dadaism.

Binns' first solo exhibition Vivienne Binns: Paintings and Constructions was held at Watters Gallery in Sydney in 1967.

Her most well-known painting, Vag Dens, featuring a brightly-coloured vagina with teeth, was hung alongside Phallic Monument, which featured male genitals.

Some critics excoriated her work, using phrases such as "monumental repulsion", "pure obscene horror", "the most disturbing artwork I've ever seen".

Artist and critic Elwyn Lynn wrote that her work her work "affronts masculinity".

After this show, Binns felt that she needed a break from painting, and became involved in community arts.

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" and doing a huge amount to stimulate and promote community arts.

She started working with vitreous enamel and other mediums formerly regarded as "crafts" rather than art.

She was influenced by and became a friend of visiting US feminist art critic Lucy Lippard in 1975, afterwards visiting New York City and connecting with the women's art movement there.

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 to 1988.

From the late 1980s Binns taught painting and drawing at the University of Sydney Art Workshop, the Tin Sheds.

In 1990 Binns travelled to central Australia and learnt some of the creation stories, art and culture from Pitjantjara women.

Also in 1990, In 1990, she was awarded an Australian Arts Creative Fellowship, enabling her to undertake a three-year research project about the cultural link between Australia and the Asia-Pacific.

In 1991, Binns spent time in Tokyo on an Australia Council residency, and later attended three South Pacific Festivals of the Arts, in Raratonga (1992), Western Samoa (1996) and Noumea (2000).

These led to a significant amount of work which included references to Captain James Cook and the artists who travelled with him, and incorporating patterns of tapa cloth, the traditional bark cloth of the Pacific region.

In 1994 she taught painting and drawing at Charles Sturt University at Albury.

She then moved to Canberra to take up a lecturing position at the Canberra School of Art (later amalgamated with the Australian National University as the ANU Institute of the Arts ), teaching several subjects.

In 1995 she started producing her extensive series entitled In Memory of the Unknown Artist, honouring the artistic endeavours of people not generally considered to be artists, such as designers of fabric, linoleum, carpet and bathroom tiles; housewives; traditional craftspeople; street artists and hobby artists.

She continued to create artworks in this series through the 2000s.

In 2000, she was resident in the Australia Council Studio in London and, in 2001, again visited Europe assisted by an ANU Faculties Research Grant.

In 2002 Binns travelled to the Kimberleys, afterwards including imagery relating to the landscape of the area, sometimes combined with Cook-related imagery and patterned surfaces.

In 2003, she collaborated with Geoff Newton and Derek O'Connor on a series of split canvases.

She retired from teaching in 2012.

Binns held a solo exhibition It Is What It Is at the Sutton Gallery, by whom she is represented, in Melbourne in 2018.

In 2019 Vivienne Binns was interviewed in a digital story and oral history for the State Library of Queensland's James C Sourris AM Collection.

In the interview Binns talks about her life, her art and her inspirations.

, aged 81, she still works and paints in her studio, although at a slower pace and sometimes intermittently; she has had one painting on the go for two years.

A major survey exhibition of her work entitled Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface opened at MUMA (Monash University Museum of Art) on 5 February 2022, finishing up there in April and starting a run at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney in July.

The exhibition includes more than 100 works, including prints, sculpture and drawing as well as her earliest paintings.

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.