When you get to a certain age as a woman you start to feel invisible. “We did it in a group which made us daring and we became this one powerful unit, so that’s part of the reason we came back together for this show. “The thing that was and is the most powerful about what we do is that we never do it alone,” says Christine. The three have remained friends through the decades. The Binnie sisters have since worked as ceramicists, and Wilma Johnson is now a “practising surfer” who lives on a naturist beach in France and has written a book, Surf Mama, about her life. The sisters’ childhood also involved membership of the Girl Guides, and their early love of camping subsequently found its way into one of their Neo-Naturist performances featuring a nude cooking ritual with a Calor-gas camping stove. “We’re all quite outdoorsy,” says Christine. Freedom of expression was encouraged at home, with crafts and organic food a part of everyday life. “The German punks were all sunbathing nude around the lake, whereas in Britain the punks were very pale, wore black and stayed indoors.” The Binnie sisters had been brought up by their artistic parents to believe in “being natural”. For Christine, a visit to Germany in the late 1970s was the initial spark of inspiration. Grayson Perry particularly was a key collaborator at the time, and took part in many of the women’s performances, later describing the Neo Naturists as “true bohemians.”Ĭertainly the trio embraced bohemian ideals from early on. It was an expression of our own femininity.” Wearing nothing but body paint was also a way for the three women to keep up and to be ever more outrageous, shocking, out-there and radical. The performance attracted a lot of attention, she remembers, including that of the police: “We had a conversation with a policeman for about 10 minutes, but in the end he didn’t arrest us, just told us to put our coats on.” Until recently, a law from the Victorian era still stood in England – it was only men, not women, who were prevented by law from exposing themselves in public.Īs Jennifer Binnie puts it: “We were part of a mostly gay scene and the openness of that scene was what allowed us to do what we did. Christine Binnie who, along with her sister Jennifer and Wilma Johnson, founded the group, recalls performing a live tableau of “fishermen and mermaids” outside the landmark Centrepoint building in central London. The exhibition incorporates film and photographs, as well as live performance – though not completely naked this time around.īy all accounts, the group’s performances were surreally humorous. Wild, non-conformist and provocative, the group was nevertheless largely forgotten, but is now being rediscovered, and has reformed for a retrospective of their work at the Studio Voltaire gallery in London. The Neo Naturists blazed a naked trail of disruption, confrontation, chaos and confusion through the 1980s London underground art scene, creating their nude happenings in front of bemused audiences at clubs, galleries and various public places, where the women often arrived unannounced, launching into their performance guerrilla style.
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