The art and practice of Vivienne Binns is as much about how art is made as the final paintings that result from the process. This leads one to be sure that the architects of SJB will greatly enjoy the experience of working with her. If this takes the form of a discussion of colour, Binns, a master colourist, would be able to step up to the challenge of helping determine the best green or a medley of greens for the glazed brick façade of 85 Campbell Street.
Binns’s is a mastery of colour that approaches the magical. Colours in paintings in the series in memory of the unknown artist (begun in the mid-1990s and ongoing) appear to change colour in different light conditions or when seen from different angles. The series is also exceptional for the way Binns renders the patterns of familiar everyday items like placemats, tablecloths, linoleum tiling and floor coverings, and celebrates the creativity of often anonymous craftspeople and tradespeople. In the way Binns works, ‘No distinction is made between the mundane and the profound’.1 Working from fabrics and domestic craft that are a kind of ‘linen closet’ of women’s art, Binns has made lesser-known artists more present in everyone’s consciousness.
The paintings are inventive in their use of texture as well as pattern. The artist adapts run-of-the-mill hand tools from Bunnings and the fine-haired art-store paintbrushes another painter would have left untouched, giving them teeth and using them to comb the surface of the paintings. Knitted and gingham fabrics appear along with woven plastics; using acrylic and metallic paints, layering the things she depicts and literally ‘combing’ the canvas makes for paintings that are visceral and direct in feel and immediately appealing to people.
Beacon that puts the project on the map
Sydney-based artist Nell was christened into The Salvation Army Church in Maitland, New South Wales, and schooled in its values as a child. The artist has shared with Flynn how she has always dreamed of making an artwork that would draw on those experiences.
Even aside from her profound connection to The Salvation Army, Nell is the ideal choice for the project and could have worked as a single artist across all the locations for art had we decided to pursue that direction. As an artist of unusual talent who works in many mediums – painting, sculpture, fibre arts, ceramics, jewellery, installation and performance – Nell might have tackled a few of the possible locations for art we are discussing. Performing with The Salvation Army band is one of Nell’s longstanding dreams and perhaps we don’t have to miss out completely: The Salvation Army can still consider inviting Nell to conceive a performance for the 81–85 Campbell Street launch.
At South Eveleigh, Nell was commissioned to create two artworks, Eveleigh Treehouse (reproduced here) and a neon work for the façade of Yerrabingin House, the precinct’s community building and Indigenous rooftop garden designed by Clarence Slockee of Jiwah. (The garden is a world-first Indigenous rooftop farm.) Happy Rain is a largescale LED light installation, depicting a happy-faced cloud with falling raindrops. Nell has said about the work: ‘I wanted to bring something that brought intimacy and humanness to the scale of the building. It’s simple and universal. I wanted to make a welcoming face for this community space.’2
Works made in clay and diverse materials in a recent Sydney exhibition (The Way Home, STATION gallery, 26 February – 26 March 2022) mused on the meaning of home. The 81–83 Campbell Street office-dwellers may have their minds on other things, but keeping the mission of The Salvation Army in mind, the questions posed by The Way Home could be meaningful to an audience for art, many homeless, in a neighbourhood that is so well served by The Salvation Army.
As a person and an artist, Nell is beguilingly down-to-earth and, like Binns, interested in the stuff of everyday life. ‘Eastern forms meet Western iconography with a bit of AC/DC and Maitland thrown in’ is how the artist describes herself and her art practice: ‘I’m a fan of Indigenous art as much as I’m a fan of rock’n’roll. I love knowing that Mabel Juli painted with Queenie McKenzie, just like I love knowing Keith Richards listened to and played with Muddy Waters.’3
Another way Nell has described her art is ‘as always exploring thresholds of binary opposites, such as the ancient and contemporary, individual and communal, feminine and masculine, sacred and profane’ – in other words, the essentials of life that we all think about in our own way and in our own time. ‘I’m either trying to amplify the tensions or marry the differences between these binary positions,’ she asserts. In so doing, her art achieves the universal.4
Nell has said that by ‘putting smiley faces on things that you wouldn’t at first associate with happiness, like a storm cloud, a gravestone, or a poo, you can no longer read the object as negative or sad – the smile is always stronger’ – and Flynn would add, the ambiguity gets people to think. The smiley face is a clue to the bountiful joy in what Nell makes. Andrew Stephens writes that ‘The smile – whose pop-cultural meaning has morphed from the original 1963 design signifying happiness to 1990s rave/ecstasy culture, to the 21st century’s most famous emoji – is an expression of joy from Nell.’5
The acceptance of artists who want to engage in the everyday is new in contemporary art; prior to about the last decade, contemporary art could be highfalutin. The genius of artists like Binns and Nell is managing to make art that is straightforward and accessible as well as sophisticated, advanced and intelligent. We all bring insights to looking at art in the public realm. In what Binns and Nell do, there is no talking down or underestimating the audience for art.
An LED work by Nell for the 81–83 Campbell Street façade could be placed high on the parapet and would be visible from afar, providing the development with a presence on the cityscape. The ideal location for a light artwork by the artist is atop the building.
Nell first employed light as art in Made in the Light (2011–12), which was the salient early project led by Allens art collection curator Ewen McDonald for the law firm’s Deutsche Bank Place premises in Sydney. The content of the work was the weather, expressed in imagery that is universal, like cumulus clouds and raindrops in a vertical configuration that cleverly exploited the tall vertical glass expanse of the lift core that was part of the newly minted Foster + Partners building design. Quoting McDonald: ‘Nell imagined a way that the weather needs people, but in this instance her graphic visualisations proposed a relationship not only between the self and the sign, the outside world and within, but among the signs themselves – how the patterns of weather form a sequence, a cycle, where sun and rain are aspects of a system (like language) by and through which we are conditioned either to adapt or withstand.’6
Entry artwork
Nici Cumpston AO is a distinguished artist, curator, writer and educator. Cumpston took on the role of inaugural Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, in 2008 and is Artistic Director of Tarnanthi.
Cumpston’s works can be described as portraits of trees that communicate the things modern science has taught us about trees – their interdependence and the benefits they endow – in a direct, plain-speaking way that everyone can understand. Water, or the absence of it, ‘via the stark motif of dead trees, arrested in mid-life’, is a central theme in Cumpston’s photographic works in series that have documented the environmentally savaged Murray and Darling River systems.7
Speaking of the 2009 series Attesting, Cumpston’s peer, the Tasmania-based Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough, commented that Cumpston’s works could be both compelling and shocking. The works are ‘testimony to the longevity of life-giving connections between Aboriginal people and … place.’ The subject of Attesting was Nookamka (Lake Bonney), which was disappearing as a result of the incursions such as suburb building; Gough continues, ‘These trees [are] testimony to what once was. Their quiet becomes our disquiet … These images will become many people’s [only] memory of a vanished place.’8
Cumpston shoots with large-format Hasselblad cameras and hand-colours the prints, a method some in the digital age might consider anachronistic. She explains: ‘One of the greatest privileges I have is to be able to walk on my ancestors’ Country, taking the time to look, feel, smell and sense their spirit guiding me. Huge ancient trees embody the spirits of our people, past, present and future. They provide welcome relief with their shade on a hot day, sustain us with a myriad of food sources and are important messengers that share ancient stories through the scars that they bear. Energised by the ancient trees and waterways of the Barka, our Darling River, I work slowly with my cameras to create photographic portraits, which act as a point of discussion to share stories of ongoing Aboriginal occupation on our land. I hand colour the images to give them reverence and to honour my personal responsibility to care for and nurture our precious waterways and all that live and breathe along it.'9
One can imagine a photo work of Cumpston’s either embedded in the glass of the façade or on the freestanding wall within the foyer of the 85 Campbell Street building. The imagery would align in a fascinating way with the green colour of the bricks of 85 Campbell Street and the green-coloured concrete of the upper section of 81–83 Campbell Street and what green suggests: plant life, sustainability, climate action – all things of interest to the Australian public.
Conclusion
Client and art advisor are aligned on the selection of artists and the locations where their art will go. The trio of Vivienne Binns, Nici Cumpston and Nell is an exciting combination of artistic visions. The Salvation Army is making a strong statement by commissioning three women artists, and the art they create will be the first exterior public works in Sydney by Binns and Cumpston. A focus on plants, trees and living forms visualised by Nell in LED neon and Cumpston in photography, along with Binns’s refined take on the colour green throughout, will make for a new and unique take on art and architecture working in tandem.
Text by Barbara Flynn, March 2023