Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM is an Australian artist known for her contribution to Australia’s Women’s Art Movement and her active advocacy within community arts. She has participated in countless exhibitions in her more than 50-year career, and her works are held in the collections of several major museums. She has worked across a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, performance, sculpture and drawing, and is respected among her Australian and global contemporaries, particularly within the feminist community.
Binns’ interest in community arts came from a desire to make the art world accessible to everyone, beyond the restrictions of art institutions. She believed creative expression was an inherent part of the human experience, and not allowing for this expression freely was a form of “social control”. In 1973 Binns worked as a field officer for the Australia Council for the Arts Community Arts Program, visiting regional areas to “investigate needs, resources and possibilities”.
In 1972 Binns collaborated with fellow artist on The Artsmobile, a travelling community arts project that brought Dada and Surrealist style performance work to centres along New South Wales’ north east coast. Described as “the offspring of a marriage between Fluxus and a local town council bookmobile”, the Artsmobile brought art-based activities to schools, seniors centres and public parks.
She later developed Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories in 1978 during her artist’s residency at the University of New South Wales. The project recalled the “lives of women and their means of expression in the domestic sphere”, by facilitating a space where participants could come and share stories of craft and needlework skills that they had been taught from their mothers and other members of their family. Described as “dense, fragmented, [and] multilayered” the final work was exhibited as a series of postcards installed on a postcard rack.
Binns began work on her next major community art project Full Flight in 1983, spending months in various towns of the Central West region of New South Wales, facilitating workshops, mural painting and skill sharing to celebrate “the creativity of ordinary people.”
Feminism was often present in Binns’ work, and she was a leader in the development of The Women’s Art Movement (WAM), which aimed to address discrimination and sexism within the art world through various actions and exhibitions. A major project was the documentation of women’s artwork through the development of the Women’s Art Register.
Binns’ first solo exhibition in 1967 in Sydney featured works such as Vag Dens and Phallic Monument and 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”.
Binns was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 1983 for Services to Art and Craft, and the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary contribution to Community Arts in 1985. Living in Canberra, she has been a Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Australian National University’s School of Art.