Hayley Millar-Baker’s photographic practice examines the ongoing effects of colonisation through the lens of her family history. She uses digital photographic techniques to carefully construct a place which evades a singular historical reference point, simultaneously encompassing the past, present and future. Millar-Baker’s conflicting visual cues create a space of provocative tension which challenges the racial politics and colonial history of Australia and propose an alternative history which affirms the continuation of Indigenous culture.

In building her photographic ‘environments’ Millar-Baker looks to only use what belongs to her, drawing mainly from her own photographs or her grandfather’s photographic archive.[i] Her works are constructed from up to 300 images, rendered in black and white and formulated within a serial structure. Recent bodies of work including Cook book 2017—19, A series of unwarranted events 2018 and Toongkateeyt (Tomorrow) 2017 co-opt the structure, language, and visual cues of historical documentary photography and film. By problematising these conventions as ‘true’ records, Millar-Baker provokes a rethinking of our history, making visible the ignored and erased stories of marginalised people.

Cook book 2017-19 consists of nine black and white photographic diptychs, featuring imagery of children in a 1960s suburban domestic setting overlayed with short instructional texts. This series explores how traditional Indigenous cultural practices have merged with Western knowledge and twenty-first century tools. Millar-Baker notes that despite the onslaught of invasion and the immeasurable changes wrought upon Indigenous people, their cultural practices, memories, and way of life have continued to be shared and preserved for generations. [ii]

Untitled (When the mother leaves snatch the eggs) 2018 is one of three works from this series in the UNSW Art Collection. This complex image is layered with competing ideas and meaning, creating humour as well as a sense of sinister trepidation. The presence of a young child, symbolic of innocence, is arresting as she inspects a bird’s nest, her actions described in simple and straight-forward language in ‘subtitles’ across the bottom of the photograph. The adjacent image suggests an automaton reaching for eggs, with some in a nest and others in an Indigenous woven basket. In piecing together these images, Millar-Baker induces a sense of uncomfortable artificiality in her works—to construct these compositions from various sources, many elements aren’t included and are subsequently lost. This allusion of First Nations culture is a subtle, yet powerful message and speaks to survival of Indigenous culture.

These descriptive texts originate from a document within her community of Gunditjmara linguistics, describing phrases, their uses and how to adjust them depending on the person and situation. In some instances, Millar-Baker has used the direct translation, and other times has joined phrases and words together to accurately describe the scene. This use of language echoes the instructional nature of a cookbook, with its direct and simple phrasing.

Millar-Baker’s complex psychological environments generate a disjointed sense of memory, place, and time. Her work posits the rethinking of an inclusive history, one which celebrates and affirms the continuation and adaptation of Indigenous culture into the present day.

Millar-Baker is a Gunditjmara woman and was born in 1990 in Melbourne. She undertook a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) in 2010, and a Master of Fine Arts, in 2017 at RMIT University, Melbourne. In 2015 she completed a Master of Teaching (Visual Arts), The University of Melbourne, Melbourne.

Millar-Baker is a highly regarded emerging artist. She has been selected for survey exhibitions including Primavera 2018: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2018) and TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Adelaide in 2017. She was a finalist in the Darebin Art Prize, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Bundoora, VIC (2019), There is Fiction in the Spaces Between: John Fries Award, UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2019) and the Ramsay Art Prize, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2019).

Her works are in the collections of Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Shepparton Art Museum, and Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne.

FEATURED WORKS FROM THE UNSW ART COLLECTION

RESOURCES

Hayley Millar-Baker | artist website

Hayley Millar-Baker | artist talk