“Patterning for me is very close to consciousness”
Vivienne Binns, 2021 (interview with Merryn Gates)

Test Pieces is an ode to the unremitting studio practice of Vivienne Binns OAM, one of Australia’s most influential artists. Offering a dynamic insight into Binns’ revelatory and unexpected image-making processes, the works assembled represent the artist’s intuitive mark-making and schematic patterning techniques, traversing three decades of studio ‘testing’. The exhibition forms a web of Binns’ sustained painterly investigation across seventy ‘test’ paintings, presented alongside the major forty-two piece installation work Particle Thought (2009).

Test Pieces highlights a longitudinal practice that embraces rehearsal and revision as core tenets of Binns’ artistic career. It explores the incidental channels through which paintings communicate, maps a topography of improvisatory making, and grapples with the guiding formal investigations of the artist’s work.

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Vivienne Binns OAM was a pioneer of feminist, collaborative and community-based practice in Australia. Binns’ first exhibition, at Watters Gallery in 1967, was widely criticised for its provocative and sexually explicit imagery. After the Watters exhibition, Binns embarked on a range of ephemeral, cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects that precipitated her role as a leading figure in the development of community-based practices in Australia. Her career was characterised by a succession of firsts, including as a founding member of the Sydney Women’s Art Movement in 1974, and her participation in An exhibition of homosexual and lesbian artists at Watters Gallery in 1978, the earliest undertaking of its kind in Australia.

Binns’ landmark work, Mothers’ memories, others’ memories (1979–1981), involved collaborating with participants at the University of New South Wales and then at Blacktown (a suburb of Western Sydney) to record matrilineal histories at a time when women’s experiences were seldom valued or documented. This iconic work is emblematic of the democratic approach with which Binns’ approach art making, whereby lived experiences informed the development of her guiding principle that art is ‘something humans do, rather than something only artists do’. In the subsequent work Tower of Babel (1989), Binns continued her collaborative, feminist and community-based approach to production.

Though returning to painting in the 1980s, Vivienne Binns remained deeply involved with community projects. Over the following years, she worked as an educator, teaching painting, drawing and art theory at Sydney University, Charles Sturt University (Albury), and The Australian National University. She developed a reputation as a generous mentor to artists including Geoff Newton, Dionisia Salas, Trevelyan Clay, Liang Luscombe and Charlie Sofo. In 2021, Binns was the recipient of the Australia Council Award for Visual Arts, while in 1985 she was given the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary contribution to community arts. Binns was additionally awarded the Order of Australia Medal for Services to Art and Craft in 1983.

Vivienne Binns’ late work in painting and assemblage distilled her prior community and feminist practice as well as an extension of her ongoing preoccupations with studio process. Her abiding interests were the function of art making as a human activity, that which occurs in all social groups, and the manifestations of this throughout these communities. This was especially visible in Binns’ use of patterning and surface treatments, connecting historical art movements to domestic, familiar imagery.

In 2022, Binns was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition On and through the surface, organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney, and the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). Examples of her work are found in the collections of major institutions throughout Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, in addition to Tate, London.