Artists statement

Land is mother, we live with the land – not off the land.

This artwork comes from Millar-Baker’s 'Toongkateeyt (Tomorrow)' series, which sees the mashing of Countries to create imagined landscapes that embody both birth country (Wathaurong) and ancestral country (Gunditjmara).

'Toongkateeyt' takes an introspective exploration of contemporary Indigenous connection to land and identity post-colonisation. Using images she took herself and those taken by her grandfather, Millar-Baker focuses on places that have played an important part in her family’s intergenerational experiences.

Artist Bio
Hayley Millar-Baker is a Gunditjmara woman from Victoria, Australia. Through contemporary approaches to photography, she draws strength from her Gunditjmara bloodlines, history, and the landscape – confronting and crafting past, present, and future stories of South-East Aboriginal existence, and honouring the connectedness of intergenerational experiences of Aboriginality.

Millar-Baker’s works draw from her grandfather’s archive, family albums, and her own treasured moments captured on and off Country. Meticulously layering, cutting, and repositioning imagery – she depicts a coexistence of times, of cultures, of transformation.

Through the application of digital technologies, Millar-Baker aligns disparate times and places – melding the collected imagery from her extensive archive together as one, to tell alternative stories and histories. What would it have been like if Southeast culture had thrived in coexistence with colonisation?

Through both materiality and process, Millar-Baker’s assemblages critically explore cultural practices and knowledge’s and investigate notions of blood memory, the evolution of cultural practices, and south-east Australian history, in relation to her own Aboriginal heritage.

Millar-Baker’s reflective narrative process enacts a powerful social commentary that acknowledges the strength and resilience of Aboriginal Australia, reimagines what could have been, and reveals the complexities of Aboriginality now.

Each work in this series is built from hundreds of individual layers and photographs. Each rock, tree, animal etc. was photographed individually and cut out to create a new landscape depicting the ‘mashing’ of ‘countries’ and a personalised experience existing today as an Aboriginal person.