Vivienne Binns: On and Through the Surface

Vivienne Binns is an important and singular figure in the history of Australian visual art. Her groundbreaking and experimental work has tested the philosophical underpinnings of art itself, both preempting and participating in the most significant cultural discourses of our times: from women’s social and sexual liberation to Australia’s regional identity. Her outstanding, multifaceted and sustained contribution to Australian art was recognised in 2021 with an Australia Council Award for Visual Arts.

‘Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface’ is the first monograph on the artist’s six-decade career and accompanies a major survey presented at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, in 2022. Edited by Anneke Jaspers and Hannah Mathews, the publication charts the dynamism of Binns’s conceptual and material investigations with an extensive, full-colour plate section; new essays by writers and art historians Terence Maloon, Kyla McFarlane, Gemma Weston, Quentin Sprague and Helen Hughes; a 2021 interview by Merryn Gates; a detailed chronology by Penny Peckham; an illustrated list of works; and historic interviews and texts with and by the artist.