Sutton Gallery is pleased to present Vivienne Binns’ solo exhibition featuring a dramatic large scale painting which deftly illustrates her interest in materiality and visual languages. Binns came to prominence in the late 1960s and has established herself as a highly respected and astute artist within the Australian artistic landscape. Her early practice undertook a groundbreaking and provocative examination of womanhood and sexuality in Australia. Throughout the 70s she implemented a number of collaborative projects in rural communities, which saw her travel around country New South Wales in a caravan involving people in arts projects along the way. Having now returned to a focus on studio-based painting, Binns’ current work draws on the knowledge and experience she has gained during more than forty years of practice as a visual artist.

Minding Clouds is Binns’ third painting of this size featuring vignettes combined with a basic ground. Each painting attempts to deal with the impossible complexities of being, living, humanity, culture, and difference, that make up consciousness, and shape our unconscious – particularly, as experienced by the artist.

In this series of three paintings, Binn’s grapples with these complexities by employing multiple images, focal points and fragments all combined on the one surface. The vignettes in Minding Clouds are taken from newspapers and magazines, postcards, and her own photographs and friends photographs, all collected over time.

My life is pretty simple these days; I work in the studio in my backyard in Canberra with whatever thoughts, feelings, ideas and memories come to me. I’m not politically active now and don’t travel much. So the world comes to me mostly through television, newspapers, magazines, books, movies, friends etc. All this stuff is the fuel for my continuing quest of making sense of existence; the world, living, society and humanity, art and relationship, understanding and love, hatred and intolerance, killing and death, pain and dying, acceptance and peace – the universe and everything!

Body, senses and mind, it’s all I have, manifesting through materials and actions; this work is a result of thinking in that way.
– Vivienne Binns, 2016