About

Dans Bain is an interdisciplinary artist based on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne/Naarm, on land that was never ceded.

Her practice spans installation, sculpture, textiles, painting, illustration, film, and photography, and is anchored in participation, collaboration, and social justice. Over the past decade, Dans has been engaged in an ongoing process of decolonising her practice, examining who holds power in the creative process, whose voices are centred, and what it means to make work responsibly in proximity to communities and issues that carry histories of harm and erasure.

 

Since 2018, Dans has participated in annual feminist public art exhibitions in Naarm's Hosier Lane for International Women's Day. The exhibitions are designed as a safe, intersectional, and decolonised space, one that actively works against the dominant narratives of a traditionally male-dominated public environment, and that prioritises the inclusion of artists from diverse and marginalised communities.

 

In 2021, Dans created The Lost Petition, now an ever-growing 38-metre, hand-written textile memorial listing the names of more than 1,200 women and children killed by male violence in Australia since 2008. The work operates from a foundational conviction: that art belongs to the people it serves, not the artist who makes it. When The Lost Petition is exhibited, survivors, families of victims, and frontline advocates are invited to carry it and speak alongside it. 

 

The Lost Petition has been carried to vigils, rallies, galleries, and Parliament Houses across Australia, and exhibited at Her Place Women's Museum, Incinerator Gallery (Mayoral Award and People's Choice Award, 2022), the Premiers' Breakfast (Brisbane), and the Respect Women Round at the MCG. The work's long-term goal is to be carried to every Parliament House in Australia; including a developing collaboration with First Nations-led organisations to bring it to Federal Parliament in a way that centres First Nations women, families, and communities.

 

Dans is also a public speaker who has addressed State and Federal Parliaments, the She Matters Rally, and school communities, always alongside a visual work, and always with the understanding that her voice is one of many in the room. Her work is endorsed by Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Director of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, and her writing has been published in Ramona Magazine.

 

The journey to decolonise a practice is not a destination. It is an ongoing commitment to accountability, to listening, to sitting with discomfort, and to doing the work of unlearning in the studio, in community spaces, and in the political spaces where this work travels. Dans approaches this commitment with the understanding that it will be shaped most meaningfully by the First Nations practitioners, communities, and Elders she is privileged to learn from.

 

Dans holds a Master of Arts (Art in Public Space) with Distinction from RMIT University (2014) and a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts from Deakin University (2007).

 

She lives with her musician partner Mike Russo, two school-age children, and her rescued terrier/kelpie, Tobie.