Vivienne Binns and her Feminist Lineages

Hannah Mathews:

Good morning. My name is Hannah Mathews. I'm Senior Curator at Monash University Museum of Art. Thank you for joining us today for Monash Form x Content. As we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that I am Zooming today from the land of the Wurundjeri people, the Kulin Nation. I'm here in my home in Thornbury, not far from Merri Merri Creek that I go to every day. It is a pleasure to be speaking with Lisa Radford, artist, educator, writer, many, many wonderful things; also based here in Naarm/Melbourne.

For low-sighted audiences, just a quick visual description. I identify as a woman, long hair, glasses on, little bit of background noise happening there with airplanes and birds in the backyard. Lisa, could I invite you to give official description of yourself and perhaps more personalised introduction?

Lisa Radford:

So I'm sitting in my lounge room as well, but it's blurred out, so you can't see anything. Some of my artworks that are hidden, not my ones, but the ones that friends have made are behind me. I've got grey hair, I'm wearing a blue shirt, I identify as a woman. I lecture at the University of Melbourne in the Honours Department, and I've just finished a stint in the Painting Department and moving into research, which should be fun.

I guess, I trained as a painter and studied there and did a PhD at Monash, but as Hannah said, I write and teach, but I guess working with other people is kind of like the spine that connects all of those things like writing, conversation and painting. Kind of the way I think through things, I guess. Is that an okay description?

Hannah Mathews:

I think it's a perfect description because it actually identifies all those reasons that we are in conversation today around both Vivienne Binns, who is an Australian artist, actually now in her early eighties. And we're talking, I guess, in the context of her current exhibition, "Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface," which is on out at MUMA until Easter time, and then going up to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in an expanded form. And Viv is kind of the axis perhaps that we're talking around today in kind of conversation and intersection with artists like yourself, Lisa, and some other artists that you've also been reflecting on who perhaps have been taught by Vivienne.

Maybe just some context for the audience first. The exhibition is the opening exhibition at MUMA 2022. And throughout the year and during the exhibition, we are doing a number of other projects, commissions, writing, publications and conversations like this, that really reflect on some of the key things of Vivienne's six decades of practice and how they have resonated through the practices of other artists and writers and educators. And we've done the curatorial work, myself and Anneke Jaspers, who's the co-curator, but unfortunately couldn't be here to join us in this conversation this morning. We've done lots of curatorial work and two years of too many Zoom conversations with Vivienne. Generous conversations, careful conversations, because she's a great... She's her kind of most insightful kind of critic, really; great writer, great thinker and very articulate.

We've done a lot of those conversations and research, but I thought really what's very key to the exhibition, and the thinking we're wanting to do around Viv is really through the frames and through the lens of artists like yourself, Lisa. And as you said, painter, educator, writer, mentor involved in publishing, involved in artist-run spaces. You mentioned just before you've been teaching 15 years and painting at the VCA. There's lots of really strong parallels between the two of you and obviously across very different generations. But I wonder as an artist, with your artist hat on first perhaps, or maybe they're inseparable and if they are, that's fine, just jump in. But if you might just reflect, I guess, on how you came to know Vivienne's work, perhaps. Yeah, I guess broadly your relationship to Vivienne's practice?

Lisa Radford:

I guess, I think I said it in email to you that I came across Vivienne's work after I had finished studying as an artist I guess, if you ever stop studying. And it came through my experience working with TCB, the artist run space, which is kind of a strange diversion. And we would get applications, which was always kind of like a fun game, because we were a bunch of friends working together. It wasn't kind of about a hierarchy or a kind of professionalism. It was about an energy or something. And I remember getting applications from Stuart Bailey and Geoff Newton and then those... And Madeline Kidd, Brian Spiers, and they kind of all swarmed Melbourne, I think, in the early 2000s as artists, and we met them all. I was working with TCB, we were in shared studios, and working with DAMP. Geoff Newton joined DAMP, kind of made himself very much known. I mean, Geoff had an exhibition at TCB, which was these cassettes, like bootleg cassettes that he'd made or recorded cassettes.

Hannah Mathews:

The paintings of them piled up.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. Paintings of them piled up like stacked or almost totemistic. Madeline Kidd did a show of paintings of football player. Brian I think was doing post grad at VCA, a little quieter and I didn't know him as much, but Geoff was very kind of present as we all know. Had a particular type of energy. And I think then the next generation of kids, I'm going to say kids, which I don't know if it's appropriate, but Trevelyan Clay, Liang Luscombe, came down. We saw their applications. You could see this kind of energy in the work, but also a kind of use of materiality and use of paint that seemed to have a common language, and didn't really know where it came from. Just other than that they were in Canberra and I didn't really know what that meant because I'm a young artist at the time also.

And then Viv Binns has an exhibition at Sutton and you go to the opening and all of her ex-students are there and you're kind of like, this is a conversation. This is a conversation with a matriarch or a woman that is so admired, or... Even if she was critical, I guess, there was a conversation there in the work. And it was really interesting learning about someone's work through her, through the practice of her students and then reflecting back on it and then being able to see myself and my context in a different way.

Geoff Lowe being one of my lecturers and thinking about his work with what's called "community practice" or collaboration or working with different groups of people. The ongoing conversation with painting and what that means. Writing, publishing, exhibiting and collaborating with students, working with a what I sensed maybe... I never asked people since about, is like a deep sense of like a question to place. Yeah.

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. I think that's really key.

Lisa Radford:

Looking at where you're standing and what you're doing, and then what's come before that or what might come after it and who's around you. And I guess that's... Then Andrew McQualter wrote about her for an un Magazine that I was editing. There was an exhibition, a small survey over works at La Trobe University.

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. That was an exhibition that Penelope Peckham, who did her PhD on Vivienne, made the exhibition as part of her PhD. And she also, at the time, I mean the PhD thesis was excellent, but she also made this extraordinary annotated biography of Vivienne which was then later published in an exhibition that Merryn Gates made of Vivienne's work as well. And so with the project with Vivienne at MUMA and MCA, and the book that we've made, Penny has kind of gone back and revisited and updated that annotated... It's just an extraordinary document because it's deeply personal and biographical and then kind of extending through professional and all the other associations that Viv has.

That Andrew McQualter text is something that we've really remembered. Because we had a really great day with her in the studio in Canberra. We were talking about writers to invite to write or reflect on her work for the book. And there were a lot of kind of known names who had written on her previously, but she was really interested in the kind of younger generation of art historians. And different things were coming off the shelf that she'd read that people had written about her work that she really enjoyed. And Andrew was one of those and Michael Ashcroft was the other person. Anyway.

Lisa Radford:

Who also studied in Canberra?

Hannah Mathews:

Correct. Yeah.

Lisa Radford:

And I guess it was in that... Like it is Australia. I mean we, I think... I don't know whether it's true, but it always does feel like Australia has a problem with art history, isn't very good at documenting it; maybe history in general and that's maybe a bigger conversation.

Hannah Mathews:

That's a big important one. Yeah.

Lisa Radford:

But also thinking about Andrew's text and it connecting the kind of lineage to the community practice, feminism, the personal narrative, and I think that he wrote that just not long after Kyla McFarlane had done the feminism show at MUMA.

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. Her PhD also. Yeah.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. Which was I felt like a really important show for me to see who I guess maybe there's kind of a laziness, I don't know, but declaring myself as like a feminist artist was not something that I had ever engaged in or maybe I didn't need to, and I didn't need to because there were people like Vivienne Binns, if that makes sense. And just thinking about those materialities and that looking at biography, place, the personal, and how that interweaves with the grand narratives or avoiding the grand narratives of art history. And thinking all the things that we've called relational aesthetics or whatever now is like has this long history of work, because that's how... Even thinking about Kerrie Poliness at the Living Museum of the West or something like that, how it is that you engage with earning a living whilst being an artist in a place where the market is kind of like-

Hannah Mathews:

Nil.

Lisa Radford:

... There is a market, but it's not like necessarily-

Hannah Mathews:

Slimmer. Yeah.

Lisa Radford:

... going to sustain you. And then, how you involve yourselves in employment-related fields and then what that feeds your work or something, or how that feeds-

Hannah Mathews:

It's true. When you step into that space, how do you sustain? How do you come up with the arrangement or the formula where that actually also sustains the practice and the questions of the practice? I think education is a... well, you're a survivor. Education is a good space.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. I mean, I can imagine. I don't know, because I've met Viv a couple times. I don't know how she ended up teaching at the university or-

Hannah Mathews:

She was invited down to do some sessional stuff for a while and then actually ended up choosing to relocate there. So she's been there the last 30 years.

Lisa Radford:

Well, I mean, it feels like it was such an important art school and art schools have really changed over the years, I guess. And it's still changing. But that, I mean, I think talking to Liang and Geoff and Danny Frommer, just the energy that Viv was able to sustain as a teacher and as someone that was engaged with the practice of making things, not with the practice, or not with the institution. But it was the drive was like making work and how to sustain that or encourage it. I mean, I don't know I was never in one of her classrooms. I mean you have Danny talking specifically about colours that Viv... Like he still remembers the colours that she said to use, which are kind of like, it's interesting, because they're kind of like Australian greys and very much of place also.

But then Liang talking about a particular energy also about place, but biography and the personal and how they interweave or something. And then I mean with Geoff, I mean he works primarily as a director now, but thinking about him as a painter where you are always kind of shit stirring the history of art with a question. It's never a didactic statement. It's an agitation and Viv's... I mean, I think some people will definitely disagree with me, but I don't find Viv's paintings easy to look at. They're not what I would call traditionally beautiful. I think they're difficult. And in that way they are very much of the place asking questions. They're using what's there, not inventing a kind of romantic-

Hannah Mathews:

Or subscribing to some kind of-

Lisa Radford:

Yeah.

Hannah Mathews:

... Yeah. I think that question of place and that question sort of self... Yeah, that questioning of place and the place that one's in and what relationship we have to it or should have to it, or have had to it or might have to it. And also the proximity of those around it, I mean, has been a really guiding question from the get go. She talks about questions of good and bad, right and wrong. These kind of quite fundamental philosophical questions actually like from a really young age and then being really confronted with those. Leaving home, moving to Sydney, studying at National Art School, choosing the painting studio out of all the things she probably really could have done and then being taught bloody figuration and just knowing like, come on, this is... Everywhere else in the world... There's modernism, abstraction, dah da.

And I think that was, I think, all those things were kind of perfect kind of storm to really get her going, that questioning. Because it was very obvious there was good reason to be questioning things. And I think also, possibly also what feeds into being a great educator and a great collaborator and a great mentor is also really committing to kind of grappling with questions about identity and self, which is the big step that happens when you do leave home and school and all those sorts of things. I think she really remembers quite vividly that period at art school and how formative, how challenging and how formative it was to finding out who she was as a person and as an artist.

Lisa Radford:

And there's a particular self reflexivity in all of that. I mean, I think in one of the interviews she was talking about making the mothers postcards and she talks about working with these groups of women and families and the importance of listening or something or not even the importance of it because she doesn't... It's not like she's like some kind of martyr, it's more that what she gets from bothering to spend the time to listen to people who are serious, whatever, the unknown artist or the unknown... What is it called?

Hannah Mathews:

Well, yeah. There's "Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories," and then there's "In memory of the unknown artist," which is kind of like a project. Yeah.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. But just that there's a dialogue with the amateur or with the things that aren't naturally included in the space of what we call now, contemporary art or something-

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. And really realising really early on how important those spaces were. And she says, I don't think she's ever named who the curator was, but some curator who was always like, "Vivienne Binns is the painter of the every day." And she's like, "Well, that's just total tosh. It's just not what I'm doing. What I do believe in is that art is everywhere as soon..." I think, yeah there's the quote, "... as soon as humans start messing with materials there's art." Whether it be tables, jumpers, tablecloths. Just all the things that we kind of choose to surround ourselves with which are all authored by somebody. Whether they be design or the making.

And just to be conscious, I suppose, that that is the reality and therefore well, being respectful, but also valuing art because it is in the world that we choose to live in as humans, is really central. And "In memory of the unknown artists," that project, I mean, a word that Viv has used quite a bit is "sensing," kind of trying to find her way through, looking, trying to understand, comprehend, and then thinking about translating onto her own canvas, like the sensing of that maker. And I think that sensing, that intuition, I think she had an early interest in theosophy as well. I think there's an element of her, we use energy, but also maybe spirit that is in her practice and is in her as a person.

Hannah Mathews:

What about your painting, Lisa?

Well, thinking again, actually, about that "unknown artist" series and there's one work in particular, it's quite specific when I think of your painting and Vivienne's painting, and it's "Parkinson and lino." And so it's a stencil of Parkinson who is one of the artists who traveled with Cook on an early voyage. It's a stencil of a botanical drawing that he made. And then across it, over it, around it, is a Vivienne painting, a pattern which was the upholstery that was appearing on London's underground Metro trains at the time that she was visiting London for a residency or research. She kind of brought these two, again, like quite vivid emblems, symbols, motif of place together in one painting.

But think about that amazing series that you did of those smaller paintings, a different upholstery. I love that. Everywhere I go, if I'm on a V/Line train I'm looking at what I'm sitting on and I'm often taking a picture and sending it to you.

Lisa Radford:

That's kind of like a disaster that's-

Hannah Mathews:

Not a disaster. It just stays with you because there's a vernacular. It's like drawing your attention.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. I mean, it's funny that I started painting those for a show that I did with Geoff Newton, so the connection's pretty like... Like two degrees of separation or something that we showed in Techno Park, which is a space run by Kim Donaldson for a few years out in Altona or Williamstown. But at the time I was teaching at TAFE. I lived in the city and I taught out in Wantirna and caught the train and a bus every day. It was pretty much a three hour round trip or three and a half hour round trip. And so you were just basically looking at these fabrics all the time. The buses changed more often than the train, obviously.

And then went overseas with my partner at the time, Ry Haskings, and we traveled everywhere on a train and it just was this conversation with... Like they look like paintings. They look like they riff-off a history of abstraction, but they're the ones that we all sit on, we share our asses with or something. Bottom liners or something. And then just the more that you think about them that they're kind of like... The bus, especially out in the burbs can be a pretty interesting place of conflict. Or not. Like really banal. And then these fabrics were designed to be anti-graffiti and to resist dirt.

To be against all the things that kind of that other difficulty of being in that space or something. And it was just a dumb question to myself, "Can you make something ugly beautiful?" It was like, "What happens if I paint these? What happens if I put them all together, even the ones that I don't like? Will someone else like those ones?" And I guess it was... I mean, they were very meditative to paint. The processes is really dumb. I like calling it dumb, like one stroke. Like the thing that you're looking at, I feel often tells you how to work with it. And then it was like they spoke more than anything else. And so they're not abstract. They're very figurative really.

Hannah Mathews:

Yes. Yeah. They're a total collapse of the two aren't they? Or combination of the two.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. And I guess at that time, I hadn't really thought about Viv's... I knew the work but hadn't thought about those works. And then it's only again in retrospect that you go, "Oh, what about that?" I've got a Geoff Newton painting that is a rip off-of a Viv Binns. You could see that it was in conversation with these things, and I kind of get that rejection of the "every day" or something.

Hannah Mathews:

Yes. It's an annoying term.

Lisa Radford:

It is. I mean, it's relevant because, especially at art school, it's kind of like you're trying to figure out what it is you're allowed to... "Allowed". What it is that you can speak or what's permissible, what can you challenge, what's not permissible? Can you insert this kind of stuff in there? And most of us grew up in the suburbs. That is our language or something.

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. Well I think it's I guess coming back to place.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. Yeah.

Hannah Mathews:

I just think that's just a reoccurring... Place and relationships seem to be a reoccurring concern.

Lisa Radford:

Andrew said something I think interesting at the end of that review where he goes, "The material act of painting is a means of achieving something like the examined life," and that's-

Hannah Mathews:

Pretty beautifully said.

Lisa Radford:

It's very succinct. It's like that process of engaging with something means you have to acknowledge all of that's around it, or something. All that like you want to. And you can see it in Viv's work. I mean, that's why the show's so exciting. Is that there isn't... If you're going to do that, there isn't just one language.

Hannah Mathews:

That's right.

Lisa Radford:

Just one way. Yeah.

Hannah Mathews:

Well, no, and it shifts. I mean, it shifts in the early... The show at MUMA begins with there's two figures. And then they come back in and like the post 2000s, right?

Lisa Radford:

Yeah.

Hannah Mathews:

But there's two figures that quickly become kind of bio pop expanded kind of lush kind of collage shapes and then moving into other. But the install team was like, "Wow, we just really felt like we just installed a show of seven different artists here," because there is this curiosity that has compelled Vivienne from that time, even before art school I would say, even at home with family, always making all the way through. And it has found itself, I would say, in absolute spaces, also a virtuosity in terms of painting; just skill and understanding of materials. But it is that curiosity has not paused.

Lisa Radford:

No.

Hannah Mathews:

And it's moved into dialogue with students, with other artists, with women, peers, just across really broad spectrum of types of conversations. But I think that dialogues, intergenerational or not, has just been really central to not even quenching because it's not such an extractive thing, but to nourishing that curiosity.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. And it means that it's kind of like I think I said before that I find the paintings not pretty, they're not traditionally beautiful, but they've also got... They're fresh is the only words that I... It doesn't matter whether you're looking at one that was made five years ago, 10 years ago, or 30 years ago, there's kind of a freshness to it like that as a viewer or whatever I am looking at it, the person in the gallery-

Hannah Mathews:

You can really kind of feel that-

Lisa Radford:

Well, you want to be in it. You want to go, "What is this? What am I looking at? How does this operate? How does it speak to that thing over there?" I mean, that's what's so-

Hannah Mathews:

It's all very active, lively.

Lisa Radford:

It's so exciting about having a survey show for someone that's practiced for so long.

Hannah Mathews:

Well, it was definitely a central question because, 2022 at MUMA, we knew we wanted to do something a bit different with the program rather than just the four shows, boom, boom, boom that we normally do. And I'd always thought as a University Art Museum something we can do, that's perhaps different to other institutions is like research, there's scholarship, something that's a little bit more discursive, and wouldn't it be great to kind of focus this around a senior woman artist. Like they do at CCA Wattis at San Francisco. I just love that model and I thought it's something really specific that MUMA can do.

And in consultation with past directors of MUMA, curators, friends, colleagues, Viv just was the obvious choice. I mean, a) because of the fact that she was kind of there and doing it first in so many different fields, like with community, with collaboration. Just deep into it very, very quickly. But also for that very reason that you've just described that the painting practice and the community in collaboration practice is just so alive and abundant. It feels contemporary. It is contemporary. And so the concerns and the questions that she is engaging with give just as much now as they did then. So it had to be someone, it had to be a figure whose practice and whose biography also, really resonated with a younger generation of artists who are working now.

What about family? Because I also, when I was thinking about talking with you about Vivienne, I was also thinking about a work that you made with your dad that you showed over at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. It's donkeys ago now. So long ago now when I was working there. And thinking about Vivienne and her own mother who she dearly, dearly, dearly connected to, and who is the catalyst for a number of her projects. So I wondered if you might be happy to reflect on family within practice.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. I guess that's kind of funny. I mean, it's not funny because I thought about it a lot, but I wondered how it was going to work in because I did work with my dad, not my mum, right? But I guess literally the elephant or the ghost in the room is that that is because... I started working with dad because my mum died the year after I finished art school. And then I ran away and lived in Japan and I came back and I got a studio at Clubs, which was above The Builders Arms and that's when you started a conversation with me, I think, and Robert Cook about making-

Hannah Mathews:

Old school, that's right. Old school. Never lose that feeling. Yep.

Lisa Radford:

Yep. Old school. And Matt Hinkley was in the show. And I remember talking to Robert Cook on the phone and I had an idea, but when you're a young artist and you... I was going to swear. I've been very good in not swearing, and you're working usually three or four jobs, probably one in a really crap hospitality job. I was working as a research assistant. I was working at a bar, Hells, and then trying to figure out where you put your life back in along with the studio.

And I guess I'd come back from having that time away. Dad had got remarried. I kind of wanted to know... He sold the house while I was away, where I'd grown up in Coburg, and had moved to Caroline Springs, which just seemed like a real big-

Hannah Mathews:

Massive.

Lisa Radford:

... disjuncture. And my stepsister had just had a little girl, Aaliyah, who's now 15, which is crazy. And I guess I wanted to hang out with him. He was a sign writer. He trained as a sign... Left school at 15 was a sign writer, and had always worked in the garage at home. And I guess I always kind of wanted that skill. And I was just thinking about who I was and how to hang out with my dad or something. How to rebuild a fracture... I wouldn't say that it was fractured, but like-

Hannah Mathews:

Reconnect.

Lisa Radford:

Death is like a rupture or something. And everyone experiences it really differently. And I guess I wanted to know something. So I kind of pitched that I would like paint these coats of arms because I'd already researched it. There was like five or six different Radford coats of arms or something. And I was really interested in mapping, like how that related to place or home and well different forms of mapping, not cartography. So I'd made a book on music flyers thinking about how I learnt about Melbourne; going to gigs basically, and traveling around following bands, wherever they were at every different venue and collected the flyers as kind of like a mapping exercise. And so I kind of wanted... Dad had grown up in Coburg as well, and so I wanted to map Coburg from memory with him.

And so I would go to his house in Caroline Springs every week, I think, or twice a week, and set up in the garage, a bit like when I was a kid how he used to paint signs on the weekends to make extra cash in the garage with just a makeshift table. We had all the paints, we went and got the paints, we drew them up and we kind of played the radio, danced and sung and my little step niece or whatever would be around the whole time talking. And we kind of like mapped from memory, did the Radford coats of arms as kind of like a, this is something apparently solid that we've got no connection... Well, I don't feel like I have any connection to. They're kind of like ghost emblem even of something that neither of us identify with.

But then also at the same time mapping this place where we'd both grown up in completely different circumstances, him from a family of seven kids or whatever, me with my brother. Pretty working class, the kind of like how it had shifted from the fifties to me growing up in the eighties. What had happened to friends or what kind of violent things had happened? Coburg's a pretty interesting place anyway, which I hadn't thought about ever being anything other than a home until you leave or like you go to uni. "Ah, wasn't it scary growing up there?" And you're like, "What? Why?" It's only oh, there's a prison there. You kind of think about all these things in a really different way. And it was just a way of... Like the painting was the thing that connected us and we could talk about process. Like it becomes a mediator, like it's a mediator for him and I. Not that there was any conflict, it was just a way of like becoming-

Hannah Mathews:

Makes it a bit more gentle. Does it make it a bit more gentle? Like something to kind of connect through.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. Sometimes it's easier to talk around something than directly-

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. Especially with parents.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. And I guess I wanted to have a relationship with my family. I guess you think about through history and it's like there's supposed to be this rejection or like a bad event or you resist it or something.

Hannah Mathews:

Sometimes you just want to come back to it.

Lisa Radford:

Well, yeah. And it wasn't about going back to it. It was about wanting to know what it could be. Like where was it going to go and how was it going to sit with the rest of my life or how I was going to do things. I mean, Jon Campbell was also another one of my lecturers at school, and I guess... And I'm studying with Lane Cormick, Colleen Ahern, Amanda Marburg at TAFE and then at uni, and I think we were all pretty... We were working class kids from the North and Western suburbs or Colleen grew up in like Leeton, and we came from the outside of art in, and Jon Campbell was this way of going, "You make work about your life." Whatever that is it's okay to speak that language. You know?

And it's kind of a... I guess it's such a trajectory of that, which kind of comes... You could historically associate it with pop art or like all this stuff. But I do actually feel like there is another language. That's why that there is that history thing and Viv wanting to work with Michael Ashcroft or Helen Hughes or it's like locating that history very specifically here isn't something that we should be afraid of or something. It's kind of like something to work toward, not resolve, because resolution's kind of stupid.

Hannah Mathews:

But embrace. Like embrace. Being happy. Be in conversation with.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah.

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. Actually I think Jon has a project coming up with Robert Cook at the Art Gallery of WA.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah, yeah. I saw Robert on the weekend-

Hannah Mathews:

Another little cycle. Yeah.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. Nice loop. And that makes complete sense to me. That's perfect. That's a perfect arrangement, but yeah.

Hannah Mathews:

You know when Viv started doing "Mother's Memories, Other's Memories," it was with a friend and they both swapped mums. So they spent the day with each other's mums looking through photo albums and having those conversations. Again, sometimes easier to talk around something or through someone else who's close, but not the same. You know?

Lisa Radford:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, and it's interesting too... I mean, I don't want to indulge in this too much, but when my mum passed away, I think, and I made a show about that later at Austral Avenue too. I vividly remember speaking about having five mums. I had my mum, but that there was also like Amanda's. I'd known Amanda since I was four. Her mom was another mum. Cathy Montesano's another mum, the lady across the road, Anna Morley, who was a big Maltese lady, dress maker. Kind of taught me how to sew and maybe cook and was a place to go, was another mum. Even though you think you're growing up in this normative, nuclear family, it actually, for whatever circumstances, kind of wasn't. There was all these other women that were really important in my life. And I would say my brother's life or our lives, you know?

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, which probably also brought great comfort to your mum knowing your children are surrounded by-

Lisa Radford:

Well, she kind of built that for whatever reason. I mean, she didn't go to university. For whatever reason she built and embraced the place that she lived in. And sometimes, I mean, later on I go to Nauru to write for Nick Mangan and that's where my mum grew up. And even thinking about Viv's relationship to-

Hannah Mathews:

The Cook Islands. Yeah. Tonga. Yeah.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. And thinking about her questions to that because her father had been-

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah, in New Guinea.

Lisa Radford:

And New Guinea. Yeah. Thinking about those relationships in proximity to Australia and how those things... Like where you grow up. So like for my mum, for example, she's growing up on a tiny island, and she has to commute on a ship to Melbourne to go to school. That creates a really different kind of set of social parameters and thinking about what home is. And so I read like when... Is this annoying? Am I being annoying?

Hannah Mathews:

No, no, no, no. You're not being annoying. You're being really generous.

Lisa Radford:

When mum died, you don't know where you stand anymore. I'm like, where... Now I'm going to swear. It's like, "Where the fuck am I? Who am I?" Like a barometer. Even if you didn't get along, has gone. So your identity is like where, who the fuck am I. And I read a book called "At Home in the World" by this anthropologist Michael Jackson, which I still quote, still tell students to go read. And he is a New Zealander. It's the first time I learned the word Pākehā. And he lived with the Arrernte and he writes this beautiful... Like it's not an academic anthropological text. It's like a text that weaves Borges with story, thinking about what place and home is for a culture that's perceived as being nomadic or not, you know?

And I guess at the time we're talking about the Tampa crisis happens, it's all kind of happening at the same time. I'm thinking about refugees, what's home, who says where the fuck home is and how you make it. And I guess all those things kind of lead to me going, "Yes, you've got to work with your family." That's what you need to know or something to be able to move forward or something, I guess. God, sorry.

Hannah Mathews:

No. I mean, I mean it's confronting stuff, isn't it? But it's kind of irrefutably part of who we are. I don't know if you can get away from that stuff, you really do have to kind of grapple with it and find your own relationship and emotional, spiritual kind of place sometimes actual like physical place with it, you know?

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. Well, I think artists look really closely at where they are. Regardless of their practice really. They're looking really closely at the artists that are around them and really closely at the community. Because I mean, there's not a big market here. It is kind of that that sustains us, like that's-

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah, that's right. It's the kind of questions that have to compel that actually is a sustaining thing rather than kind of income or what have you. I did read on International Women's Day last week, there was an article I read on Viv and it had a great quote and it was something just not verbatim, something along the lines of art is the thing that you can use to kind of process all these questions without destroying the world. And just five minutes earlier I'd been reading about Russia and the Ukraine. And I was like, it's just so true. Like it is just through this kind of commitment to thinking this lens, you can actually grapple with all these big things without destroying the things around you.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. You might add a lot of junk, but yeah.

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah, yeah. But like it's not a-

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. It's not a disruptive, it's a contributive thing.

Hannah Mathews:

It's a contributive thing. And it's a gentle way of being in the... Not gentle but way of being in the world, that's kind of, well, it's kind of contained, it's reflective, but it's contained and yeah.

Lisa Radford:

It's an invitation, like you make a thing that's kind of an invitation. I mean, being on Zoom for the last two years as you know was horrible. But what I found really fascinating was that at art school, even though all the things that are so great, like being around each other, accidental conversations, the "That's fucking awesome," and then walking away and the student having to think about it. And whatever that is, were gone. But we still made stuff. And you could still put it between us and talk about something that we didn't understand-

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. It's true.

Lisa Radford:

... without having to know. Theory kind of implies that there is something that you'll extract from the text that is good for you or like contribute to the argument or whatever. Whereas like the things that we put were... It could be funny, humour, debate, no one knows what they are and they're continually negotiated and it kind of was like, "Oh, this is terrible, but this still works. Like we can do this." That's a kind of really generous act really to make something and put it in the world and go, "I'm going to trust you'll engage with it. And if you don't, I don't care."

Hannah Mathews:

Sharing.

Lisa Radford:

Someone else will. Yeah.

Hannah Mathews:

Someone will, somewhere.

Lisa Radford:

Someone will. "Well, what does it do?"

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. We had a little like a preview of the exhibition with a conversation we did in the gallery. And really her last words in that conversation was like, "To the government for God's sake. Can't you see the power of this little thing that we artists make. It is so evocative. It is so powerful. Please." It was really this kind of yeah, this call out.

Lisa Radford:

Well, I mean, that feels, especially in the last two years, really poignant and especially in relationship to ongoing, kind of like decimation of the sector and the sector includes education. And that education is bigger than just like formalised education. And what these little things... Like we were just saying contribute is that they act as a mediator between things, like between us. So you can speak between cultures with things that don't have words like that we don't even share the same language for. I mean, that's why the translation was so great.

Hannah Mathews:

Such an interesting, interesting... Yeah, totally.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. That's what's amazing about teaching at art school is that you're constantly... Like I get older, they kind of stay the same every year. They kind of come in and they're around about the same age again -ish and you're like, "I don't know what this is. What is this? What are they into now? What are they trying? What are they asking questions about? What do they feel fragile or vulnerable about?" And it's so exciting to always have to be... I mean, it's why I liked working with TCB for so long too because I had to look at things that I don't understand, that I don't know what they are. And then have to generate conversations around them. Trusting. Geoff Lowe talks a lot... We used to talk a lot about the not knowing. I mean, it's kind of like sitting in a pool of it or something.

Hannah Mathews:

The skills for sitting in a pool of it, which not everyone has. I mean, and that's where you get great educators. That's also where you get great mentors, like people who have kind of found a way or just innately had their way and share it. Can I ask you Lisa, I ran into you and Rosemary Ford in the exhibition. So can I ask how it was to be amongst all those paintings, given that the show at MUMA is primarily through a kind of painting lens in terms of Viv's return to painting over those six decades?

Lisa Radford:

I mean, I guess it's a bit like I'm a fan. I was so excited to be in there and I always want galleries to be much bigger so that I can have more and more space between things. But I guess what was really fun, like fun is such a funny word to use with regards to paintings, but it does actually feel like the right word because it's not reverie and it's not like austere in there. That energy that we talk about is actually in so much in the work that you kind of bounce around, you bounce around the spaces and especially when you get into the large galleries on the-

Hannah Mathews:

Oh yeah. In the North gallery kind of like the latter and early work.

Lisa Radford:

I was trying to think about the direction. One of the things that gives me the shits about big institutions is that people feel like they have to follow a certain path-

Hannah Mathews:

Oh yeah. No, you can't do that. Not at our place.

Lisa Radford:

It's not linear. And I bounced around from wall to wall and it was nice being able to experience in space, like really early works, the gouache works and then the later lino painting works and seeing... We often don't get to see those connections over a long period of time in the materiality of work and how it speaks. And of course it's there because like, I still use words that I learnt when I was four or something or like phrasings, do you know what I mean? It's like phrasings in language or the vernacular of slang of growing up wherever I grew up compared to like where you grew up and the way you put things together is kind of in the painting as well. And it's really that I can only experience by going to see the show and I guess also excited to go and see then how it changes and what gets added in Sydney.

Hannah Mathews:

In the Museum of Contemporary Art. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think one of the key things in both shows, because one grows in a way from another, is this recursive nature of questions and this kind of lexicon of motifs that Vivienne uses from the 1960s through to 2019. Like not explicitly altogether in rooms, but like just how they kind of cycle through and across those six decades. And yeah, I think actually space can work against you sometimes like the floor plan, but you've got to work with what you got, and actually I think the floor plans at MUMA kind of actually facilitated or supported in some way the kind of seepage that happens across her practice over those six decades.

Lisa Radford:

There was that spine and then a kind of loop kind of structure, there's kind of a loop in the architecture. It does feel like you can keep going and move between things. And it was good to go with Rosemary who was less familiar with Vivienne's work and have that conversation and also realisations because someone's asking you, "But what's that? And did she live here?" And you're like, "Yeah, she must have done a residency..." Like you're figuring it out in real time.

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. All the parts.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. And then go home and read the catalogue and it... Well, it's not a catalogue, it's a monograph.

Hannah Mathews:

It's probably a monograph. It's a biggie.

Lisa Radford:

It's definitely a monograph and it's so incredible. It's such an... It feels stupid. It feels like being proud or like you're seeing something recognised in... I mean, identity in gender is not something that I've ever... Like I said before, it's like being a feminist artist isn't like something that I put into my own lexicon, but you go, oh yes. This is like this needed to happen. This is so important to be able to see this language represented, this person's language that they've built over like what is it?

Hannah Mathews:

Yeah. Six decades. Six decades. Yeah.

Lisa Radford:

Years. She's the same age as my dad, which is also fun for me to think about. And they met once when we were in the ACCA painting show.

Hannah Mathews:

Oh, the painting show. Yeah, yeah.

Lisa Radford:

And it was just like, okay, there's two energetic people and my dad got a bit quieter. My dad was just looking at her going, "Wow. She's amazing."

Hannah Mathews:

Well, she genuinely is. Yeah. She genuinely is amazing, you know? And I think she's also one thing I noticed when Viv came down for the opening at MUMA she's never short of a word generally, right? She is a great, great person to be in conversation with. But I think being in the gallery with all those paintings was really overwhelming because what artist makes works expecting to see them, so many of them together again? That's pretty overwhelming and pretty like, "Give yourself a big pat on the back." Like feeling proud, I think that was a real sense of pride.

I should say actually that Saturday, the 9th of April, we're holding a finissage event at MUMA in the afternoon that Vivienne's coming back down for from Canberra-

Lisa Radford:

That'll be good.

Hannah Mathews:

... and Anneke Jaspers whose co-curator from MCA will be in town. And then we've also invited several artists who mostly are living here in Melbourne, but who were taught by Vivienne, to reflect on that relationship with her present, which is going to be pretty funny. There'll be some corrections, no doubts, and through artworks in the show. So there's also going to be that... And that's part of the programming this year. Like reflecting back on artists through the voices of other artists as well. We're probably at 45 minutes, but Lisa, is there anything you wanted to talk about or I don't know, reflect on?

Lisa Radford:

I guess I kind of like want to say thanks for letting me speak about Viv or something. Because she is a... Like she's not a friend and she wasn't my teacher. I kind of always talk about the idea that you can have... The beauty of art is that you can have conversations with people from across history and across time because you're speaking through the work. So it's kind of nice I guess, to put something verbal out, make it material in a different way. And especially because she contributed so much to the Melbourne art scene, I guess, without even being here.

Hannah Mathews:

I know, it's true.

Lisa Radford:

The presence is pretty-

Hannah Mathews:

Her spirit's here.

Lisa Radford:

Yeah. Yeah. And that energy for painting and making is a really great injection to have or something.

Hannah Mathews:

That's true.

Lisa Radford:

Where there's like a no... Not no fear. What's it like, it's not self conscious, like it's self reflexive, but it's not self conscious. And there's something great about that. Anyway, that's all.

Hannah Mathews:

Well, I'm going to say thank you to you because you've actually... It's been great to hear about you talk about Vivienne, but also your own work through words and through artworks and through relationships and through the multiple hats of artist, writer, educator, collaborator that you are also. And as I said at the start, you were just the top of the list. I couldn't have thought of a more perfect parallel match across different cities and generations. So thank you kindly. It's bee