Description:

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.

"Binns is one of those artists that Australian art history can’t really handle—her work, her professional career, her personal biography, is too polymorphous for us. This show has a hefty catalogue with five provocative essays, which together do an extraordinary job of coming to terms with Binns. But, nevertheless, a central section of over 150 pages of illustrations, a selection of vintage interviews and a forensic biography by researcher Penny Peckham is also required to explain the artist’s lush malleability."
– Victoria Perin in Vivienne Binns: On and Through the Surface, MeMO Review

"It's hard to overestimate Vivienne Binns's contributions to Australian art, and to feminism. This huge book – Vivienne Binns: On and Through the Surface – does justice, in words and images, to her long and generous career as an artist in the "high art" and the community arts contexts. Few have managed to be so outstanding in both fields. The variety is staggering and the joy is ubiquitous.
– Lucy R. Lippard

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; works are reproduced and shown in varying amount of detail for the first time zooming in and out of Binns' intricate and detailed works. The publication is complemented by a visual index showing all the works in scale.