Since 1996 I have published regularly on contemporary visual art with an emphasis on lens-based, emerging and feminist practice, working closely with artists and commissioning editors on numerous catalogue essays and critical texts for anthologies and artist monographs. I’ve also published reviews and essays in journals and periodicals including Art New Zealand, Art Monthly Australia, Australian Art Collector, Eyeline, Photofile and un Magazine.
A lot of my published art writing is listed here: CV
I’ve also written artist profiles for The Age and was a regular television reviewer for The New Zealand Herald in the 1990s. I have a creative non-fiction writing practice, too.
Some recently published art writing:
Catalogue essay for Kirsty Budge’s 2024 exhibition Brown MIrror: Paintings from Behind at Daine Singer Gallery, Melbourne.
A series of short texts on the theme of movement in photographs in the collection of the NGV, for Photography: Real and Imagined, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2023.
‘Process and Relationship, the Way Things Fit Together’, in Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface, edited by Anneke Jaspers and Hannah Mathews, published by Monash University Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Powered by Power, 2022
Excerpt:
‘Postcards made from vitreous enamel on metal. A travelling art van in a park. Invitations to family, friends and colleagues. A happening. Another happening. A Tower of Babel, still in formation. Slide shows, family albums. Screen printing workshops. Enamel workshops. Walks with artists. Conversations between mothers and daughters, and others’ mothers, others’ daughters. Conversations. Exhibitions in galleries. Exhibitions in shopping centres. Community classes. University classes. Shared artists’ studios, individual artworks. Separate artists’ studios, shared artworks.
The list above describes just some of the many situations and outcomes in Vivienne Binns’ practice with others, across several decades. She has moved in and out of community and collaborative practice through her long career, which has undergone periods of deep self-reflection and highly committed engagement in equal measure. Across the key activities Binns has undertaken in this realm, many of them in the 1970s and 1980s, we can make fulsome connections to the history of contemporary art practice. They can variously and productively be read in relation to the dematerialisation of art, feminist art, socially-engaged practice, and the post-modern shift away from the artist as author. But there is also something more singular and more persuasive to observe in Binns’ approach—the rigour and specificity of her own artistic practice, developed in the context of her philosophical understanding of what art is.’
Excerpt:
‘Viraginis: warrior woman, whose position is infinitely, strongly held. Peribat: to vanish, perish, be absorbed, pine away or disappear. The Latin titles of these works connect the present to a language that is also an origin story – the language of the Romans; the base of the tree from which Romance languages grew and evolved. An Ecclesiastical language. But it is also dead language, no longer spoken. A relic, a silence. A melange of other cultural histories meld into, or are alluded to by the form of these works. Viraginis shares qualities with mannerist sculpture, the post-Renaissance movement that elongated and exaggerated its subjects and delighted in an active instability rather
than grounded regularity. And Peribat, in its beautiful, explicit rendering of sexual expression beyond the cis het male, is aligned to the intent and sensibility of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, a classicist who asserted that “if I photograph a flower or a cock, I’m not doing anything different.”’
‘Fellow Travellers’, in Ruth Maddison: It was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2021
Excerpt:
‘When I call Ruth Maddison to talk about The Fellow Traveller, she started by telling me that her parents Sam and Rosa ran a wholesale electrical business. So far, so ordinary.
Then she proceeded to talk a little more about her father, Sam Goldbloom. He was, she said, a political activist since World War Two, working on the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. He was on the World Peace Council from the mid 1950s-80s, which involved a lot of travel to anti-war conferences overseas, and a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s. Subsequently, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was part of Ruth’s childhood, in the cliched, spy novel coming-to-life way that surveillance works – ‘cars on the hill, clicks on the phone’.’
‘A Robust Vulnerability’, in Raquel Ormella: I Hope You Get This, ed. Rebecca Coates, Shepparton Art Museum/NETS Victoria, Shepparton, Victoria, 2018
‘In Raquel Ormella’s Return to the beginning 2013, an array of blue and white stars cascades down the wall. This little constellation of falling stars is held together by blue ladders that hang from the bottom of a thinly edged rectangular space. Looking closely, in the top left corner of the border surrounding this hollowed out space, we see blue, then white, then red – traces of a Union Jack. We know it well, and the particular shade of blue that surrounds it. Then, in the white stars below, we might recognise the seven-pointed Commonwealth star, and the five stars of the Southern Cross, upended.
This delicate structure reconfigures a familiar readymade – a nylon Australian flag. Through careful labour, Ormella has excised the stars from their usual positions, scattering them out into a parallel universe where they now exist amongst other stars. Extracted from their place in the flag, they are released not only from their geographical specificity, but also their years of symbolic service to the nation.’
Kyla McFarlane 