lit a candle 1h agoI don't really know what to say, I only found her work a few years back through a book on feminist art history. Vag Dens from 1967 stopped me cold when I first saw it reproduced. 85 years old, still working. That's the part I keep sitting with.
Their story
Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM was an Australian painter, enameller, teacher and community artist whose work helped define feminist and collaborative practice in Australia. Born in Wyong, New South Wales, on 6 December 1940, she was the youngest of five children of Joyce and Norman Binns. While her father served overseas…
Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM was an Australian painter, enameller, teacher and community artist whose work helped define feminist and collaborative practice in Australia. Born in Wyong, New South Wales, on 6 December 1940, she was the youngest of five children of Joyce and Norman Binns. While her father served overseas during the Second World War, Joyce raised the children in Young before the family settled in Sydney's Willoughby and later Wollstonecraft. Binns attended North Sydney Girls High School and studied painting and drawing at the National Art School from 1958 to 1962, where teachers including Dorothy Thornhill, John Olsen, Godfrey Miller and John Passmore shaped her early training.
After graduating she briefly worked as a telephonist, spent months in Melbourne, then returned to Sydney determined to build a career from Australian materials and ideas rather than waiting for overseas validation. A close creative relationship with artist Mike Brown deepened her interest in art found outside high-art institutions. Automatic drawing led her toward sexual imagery, culminating in Phallic Monument (1966) and Vag Dens (1967). Her first solo show at Watters Gallery in 1967 shocked critics with brightly coloured sexual forms and a rough, unfinished aesthetic. Some called the work "monumental repulsion" and "pure obscene horror." Artist-critic Elwyn Lynn wrote that it "affronts masculinity." The exhibition is now widely treated as a founding moment of feminist art in Australia, predating Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party.
After that show Binns stepped away from painting and into enamel, craft commissions and community arts. From 1973 she worked as a field officer for the Australia Council's Community Arts Program, visiting regional centres to map needs and stimulate local practice. She was a founding member of Sydney's Women's Art Movement in 1974 and, with Marie McMahon, organised Experiments in Vitreous Enamel: Portraits of Women (1976), often described as Australia's first truly feminist collaborative exhibition. Landmark participatory projects followed: Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories (1979 to 1981) at the University of New South Wales and in Blacktown, recording matrilineal craft and domestic memory; and Full Flight (1981 to 1983), two years living in a caravan across central western New South Wales, co-making murals and workshops with townspeople. She later edited Community and the Arts: History, Theory, Practice (1991), a key text for community practitioners.
Binns returned to studio painting in the mid-1980s while continuing to teach at the University of Sydney Tin Sheds, Charles Sturt University in Albury, and from the mid-1990s at the Canberra School of Art (Australian National University). An Australian Artists Creative Fellowship (1990 to 1993) funded research into cultural exchange between Australia and the Asia-Pacific. Residencies and festivals in Tokyo, Rarotonga, Samoa and Noumea fed series that layered Captain Cook imagery with tapa patterning and landscape. From 1995 her ongoing In Memory of the Unknown Artist series honoured fabric, linoleum, tile and hobby artists usually excluded from museum histories. The collaborative Tower of Babel assemblage of boxed dioramas, begun in 1989 with dozens of friends and colleagues, continued for decades.
Major recognition arrived across her career: an Order of Australia Medal for services to art and craft in 1983; the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary community arts in 1985; inclusion in invitational prizes at the National Gallery of Victoria; and the Australia Council Award for Visual Arts in 2021. In 2022 a major survey, Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface, opened at Monash University Museum of Art and travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, gathering more than 100 works across painting, print, enamel and sculpture. Her work is held by the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Tate and other public collections.
Binns never married and had no children. She lived her last decades in Canberra, painting into her eighties and mentoring younger artists. She died in Canberra on 1 August 2026, aged 85. Her family remembered a brilliant painter, teacher, craftsperson and community-arts trailblazer who lived as a professional artist to the end. Funeral rites were held in Canberra on 17 August 2026.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia; Design and Art Australia Online; Sutton Gallery; Tender Funerals Canberra; ABC News; ArtsHub.
In their own words
“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.”
On feminism and women's art heritage (quoted in scholarship on her practice)
“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.”
On community arts philosophy
“Art has always been the way I come to understand the world ... not just the world but what it is to be human.”
Quoted in The Saturday Paper profile (2022)
“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.”
On democratising art practice
“Art is something humans do, rather than something only artists do.”
Guiding principle cited by Sutton Gallery biographical note
“Waiting for those little moments of inspiration.”
Phrase used as title of Tate's 2021 Canberra studio interview film
“She lived her life as a professional artist to the very end.”
Family funeral notice, Tender Funerals Canberra, August 2026
“Vivienne was a brilliant painter, teacher, craftsperson, community arts trailblazer, deep thinker, feisty charismatic who lived her life as a professional artist to the very end.”
Family funeral notice published by Tender Funerals Canberra, August 2026
Photos
2Vivienne Binns in later life
by People Forever
Vivienne Binns OAM in academic regalia as National Art School Fellow, 2016
by People Forever
