BILLY BAIN

Billy Bain builds new narratives of Australian Indigeneity through his distinctive ceramics, painting and printmaking practice. Charged with expressive power, political resolve and tongue-in-cheek humour, Bain’s figures reclaim spaces for erased peoples and stories, reimagining classically white Australian domains, such as the beach, pub and sports fields, as thriving centres of Aboriginal life. In repopulating his contemporary urban context with diverse and particular figures—speaking, smirking, walking and surfing—Bain subverts fetishised notions of Indigenous life and reframes resistance as an everyday act.

Raised in the coastal suburbs of the Northern Beaches of Sydney, the artist’s earliest connections to Country came in the form of surfing waves that surround the Dyarubbin (Hawkesbury River) opening. “By taking space in these waterways and beaches I am continuing a familial legacy,” the artist says, describing the importance of the river to Dharug people. His artistic practice has been propelled by a parallel imperative for self-determination and assertion. For Bain, autobiography becomes the framework to tell the multivalent stories of an entire social milieu.

“It’s my cultural responsibility to keep stories of my people circulating, to be honest to myself and true to my story, which is not a typical story of Aboriginality”

Many of Bain’s ceramic sculptures are hand-moulded, intuitively built and marked with etchings, to improvise characters, much as in his childhood practice of drawing comics. The figures are laden with layers of embellishment and accoutrement to construct personae with social and political reality. Elements such as gold-lustred chains occur repeatedly in Bain’s work, alluding to histories of enslavement and emancipation, and hinting at the allure and power of objects perceived as tacky or kitsch. The expressions and postures of Bain’s human and animal figures encompass a gamut of historical, social and dynamic registers. Bain’s painting and printmaking practices continue his interest in world-building and constructing the space for visualising complex stories of contemporary Aboriginal life.

A large ceramic installation, Dog Walker (Plan B) (2024), imagining the artist in an alternative career as a dog-walker, is one of the key works in the seminal international touring exhibition Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia, now at its final stop at the National Gallery of Australia until 24 August. Bain’s 2025 Archibald Prize finalist portrait, Rona and Pig at Palm Valley (2025) became the first work by a Dharug artist to enter into the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The work depicts Western Aranda artist and potter, Rona Panangka Rubuntja, in a frame inset with ceramics tiles, created by Bain and his family.

^{Text courtesy Ames Yavuz, Singapore/Sydney/London.}