Hayley Millar Baker

Prato project 2022

The residency has been one of the greatest experiences in my practice.
To live within such a culturally rich centre, and live the Italian lifestyle, has had a positive effect onf my practice and the way that I work. It’s been a privilege to slow down, connect deeper within my practice, and situate myself and my work internationally.
I’m beyond grateful for this opportunity and look forward to strengthening the connections made in Prato abroad, as well as continuing with my projects at home with my new found way of working.

During her residency Hayley worked on the development of three of her projects including a photography project that she will complete in Melbourne. After spending some time in Rome and London, establishing important connections with gallery directors interested in collaborating with her, Hayley was invited as a guest speaker at the second edition of the workshop Decolonising Cities: Art and transcultural placemaking, part of a research project led by Annalisa Frisina and Filippo Focardi (University of Padova), Matteo Dutto and Samuele Grassi (Monash University) and Francesco Ricatti (Australian National University). Hayley also shared her work and practice with students in the Monash Global Campus Intensive unit Representing Migration in Europe: Crisis, Creativity and Culture led by Professor Paul Long, Director of the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre (MMIC).

Just before the end of her residency in Prato she was awarded a two-year residency at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne.

Background

Hayley Millar Baker is a Gunditjmara Djabwurrung artist, born in South-West Melbourne, Australia (1990). She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2010) and Master of Fine Arts (2017) at RMIT University in Melbourne.

Through examining the role our multi-faceted identities play in translating and conveying our experiences, Hayley works across photography, collage, and film to interrogate and abstract autobiographical narratives and themes relating to her own identity - drawing on spirituality, Indigeneity, womanhood, motherhood, and the psyche. Her oblique storytelling methods and methodologies encourage us to embrace that the passage of identity, culture, and memory are not linear nor fixed.

Hayley’s works are held in significant public institutional collections across Australia, and she has exhibited nationally and internationally. Hayley has been a finalist for several prestigious national art prizes including the Ramsay Art Prize (2019 and 2021), Bowness Photography Prize (2021), John Fries Award (2019) and international prizes including Hong Kong’s Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2021), and the United Arab Emirates’ Vantage Point Sharjah 9 (2021), and has won the John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship for the National Photography Prize (2020), the Darebin Art Prize (2019), and the Special Commendation Award for The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize (2017).  Hayley presented a new commission ‘Nyctinasty’ for the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony at the National Gallery of Australia (2022). She was selected as one of eight artists to exhibit in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Primavera: Young Australian Artists (2018) and has been awarded several residencies including the First Nations Residency at Collingwood Yards (2021) and the Photography Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria (2019). Hayley was a feature artist in PHOTO2021: International Festival of Photography (2021) and has exhibited in other art festivals including the International Ballarat Foto Biennale (2017), and Tarnanthi (2017).

In 2021 Hayley presented an early career-survey exhibition ‘There we were all in one place’ at UTS Gallery, curated by Stella McDonald. The exhibition brought together five pivotal bodies of work created between 2016 and 2019 for the first time and toured Australia in 2022.

Three of Hayley’s works are held in the Monash University Collection. 
Find out more on Hayley Millar Baker’s website.