Viv Binns in her Canberra Studio, 2021. Photo Zan Wimberley.
Vale Vivienne Binns.
It’s hard to describe the reach of Vivienne into the culture of art in Canberra and the School of Art and Design. She came to Canberra when it was still a smallish town, emptied out by de-centralising politics of the 1990s. In this small world, she was a big presence, with firm opinions, a feminist politic and a queer heart. Vivienne started teaching the School in 1994 in sculpture with David Watt focusing on performance and relational collaborative projects. From 2000 to 2007 she ran Foundation studies, the course that was full time for students in the first 6 months, shaping the thinking and approach they brough to the rest of their degrees. From 2008 till when she retired in 2012, Vivienne taught in Painting, alongside Ruth Waller, Peter Maloney, Elisa Crossing and myself.
Viv had a long and exemplary exhibiting record that has national and international impact. In 2022 the Museum of Contemporary Art and Monash University of Modern Art, mounted an extensive survey exhibition Vivienne Binns: On and Through the Surface that brought together her early community work with her later abstract paintings. Here at the ANU at the Drill Hall Gallery in 2007, many students would have seen another of her survey shows Vivienne Binns, that included photo documentation of her early experimental performances. Vivienne gave several great floor talks during the run of this show. They were filled with sparkling frank insights into how she felt at the time of a work’s making as well as the artistic and material questions she was grappling with.
Vivienne worked consistently with Graduates from The School of Art & Design, mostly but not exclusively those who she had contact with in Painting: Melissa Radcliffe, Steph Jones, Ham Darroch, Karena Keys, Emma Beer, Jacob Potter, and most recently with Ester Carlin, Brian Fong, and Emma Rani Hodges. Amongst these artists assistants, Dionisia Salas became her chief studio manager and carer in the last years of her life. Writing these names, I think of all these artists as compelling, smart, quick thinking and materially intuitive people. Which makes sense, because that is what Vivienne gravitated towards, and brought out in students: curiosity and generosity. She liked nothing better than to have an intense conversation about art and life. Timetables, meals, deadlines, walking her dogs would just have to wait.
While Vivienne spent the second part of her life in Canberra, she once described in that her heart and the forming of her soul was deep in the water the inner harbour of Sydney. That the days drifting as a young adult with a fishing line over the edge of a tinny was where heart yearned to be. At the time I understood this to mean that the experience of light reflecting off the pattern of the moving of water, this constantly changing complexity, was something she carried with her always.
In the last years of her life Vivienne was cared for by a close group of friends. She was visited regularly by many people to continue the conversations about art and life. May we all be so lucky to be loved and held. Vale Viv, may your spirit be light dancing on the ocean.
Dr Raquel Ormella