MUMA Tote Bag – Vivienne Binns, ‘Urban Graph’

MUMA Tote Bag - Vivienne Binns, Urban Graph

Vivienne Binns

Urban Graph 2018-9 (detail)

Monash University Collection, Narrm/Melbourne

Vivienne Binns has been a key figure of feminist art in Australia since the 1960s and was enormously influential as a teacher. Through her involvement with ARX (Artists’ Regional Exchange) she encountered tapa bark cloth making in the late 1980s, which led her to visit Raratonga in the Cook Islands for the Sixth Pacific Festival in 1992. The grid-based tapa patterns subsequently informed the compositional logic of her paintings. Binn’s reappraisal of the status of ‘craft’ and ‘amateur’ arts practices as ‘fine art’. Taking ‘graph’ as the Greek root for ‘writing’, Urban Graph can be understood as the writing of the city, the grids of its streets and structures with all their imperfections and underlying forms.

Fabric: 14 oz cotton canvas
Size: 46 h x 48 w x 16 d cm
Features an internal pocket
Internal Pocket: 20 w x 18 h cm 
Edition: 250

Printed on the occasion of MUMA's 50th anniversary.

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Photos by Christian Capurro