By Willow Rose
Hayley Millar Baker is a contemporary Aboriginal artist of Gunditjmara, Djabwurrung and Anglo-Indian descent. She was born at the old Werribee hospital and raised in Wyndham Vale and attended both primary and secondary school in Werribee. For the first 14 years of her life she lived on the last street of Wyndham Vale backing onto paddocks that went all the way to the You Yangs.
Hayley is an internationally acclaimed artist and has been prominently featured in numerous major group and solo exhibitions both locally and overseas.
Now Wyndham Art Gallery is featuring her work with an exhibition titled; Hayley Millar Baker: Selected Works
Featuring six series of work made over the past decade it includes photographs, collage, poetry, video and film works.
Selected Works honours the strength of Indigenous women and speaks to the power women hold in connection to themselves, their communities, and the spiritual world; a power sustained through multi-generational resilience.
Selected Works offers a deep reflection on relationality and continuity and invites viewers to witness the profound interconnection of Indigenous body, spirit, and land.
For local audiences, the exhibition is an opportunity to connect deeply with the work of an artist whose practice continues to grow alongside the community.
Through captivating visuals and immersive soundscapes, observation becomes a meditation on presence, responsibility, and the uneasy coexistence of care and complicity.
The exhibition debuts a series commissioned by Wyndham Art Gallery titled She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile. It includes landscapes of Werribee, You Yangs to Werribee Gorge and further west reaching up towards Lorne. The presence of red is deliberate and infers associations with blood, violence, and rupture. The photographs are cut and reassembled, edges left open, echoing the harm enacted upon land and people acknowledging land as a witness to thousands of years of stories, spirits, and bodies, and as a bearer of memory and pain.
This free exhibition is deeply moving and offers a real insight. An adjoining space called the ‘archive room’ has a selection of past work and reading material which have informed Hayley’s practice and welcomes visitors to sit, read, and contemplate the stories, themes and issues that have shaped her artwork. These materials offer insight into the evolution of her practice, from its formative concerns to the conceptual and cultural frameworks that continue to inform her work and underpin her artistic process. This space is less about chronology than return, showing how certain concerns persist, shift, and deepen over time.
There are also public programs including: a digital collage workshop, art making in the space during ‘Analog Art Club’ sessions and an artist in conversation workshop.
The exhibition is on display until Sunday 14 June at the Wyndham Art Gallery, 177 Watton St, Werribee.
For more information on the exhibition and public program events visit: wyndham.vic.gov.au/hayley-millar-baker
