Hayley Millar Baker | Untitled (Give the dog the small fish we will cook the big fish) Part 1 | diptychs
Cook Book explores the merging of traditional Aboriginal cultural practices with Westernised 21st Century knowledges and tools. As Aboriginal people, we have passed down stories to the next generation for hundreds of centuries in order to preserve timeless knowledges and our way of life – even through the onslaught of change that invasion and forced assimilation brought with it.
In our contemporary landscape, cultural practices lending from natural systems and environments including hunting, cooking, crafts, building, and language have extended to incorporate Western technologies and tools. The same practices have the same outcomes, however, during the ‘making’ period we are now able to integrate contemporary tools to provide opportunities for cultural practices and knowledges to be revisited in order to adapt to a fast-paced and ever-changing environment.
Cook Book considers how Western implements have become part of Indigenous cultural practices in day-to-day activities through a play on language that acts as a narration. It is through the translation of phrases and instructions that Cook Book emphasises how our timeless practices and knowledges have evolved to ensure cultural continuity in the 21st Century, despite the immeasurable changes around us.
Hayley Millar Baker (Gunditjmara, AU) is a cross-cultural research-driven, contemporary artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Using her mediums of photography, multimedia, and research, Hayley examines human experiences of time and memory, resulting in monochromatic photographic works – often in series that divulge her storytelling methodology. Millar Baker holds a Master of Fine Arts at RMIT (2017) and has been selected for the Ramsay Art Prize (2019); the John Fries Award (2019); as one of the top eight young Australian artists for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney’s Primavera (2018); The Josephine Ulrick and Win Shubert Photography Award (2018). She has won the John and Margaret Baker Fellowship for the National Photography Prize in 2020, the Darebin Art Prize in 2019, and the Special Commendation Award in The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize in 2017. Her work has been exhibited nationally including her first career-survey at University of Technology, Sydney (2021), PHOTO2021: International Festival of Photography (2021), TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art (2019, 2017) and Yirramboi Festival (2019, 2017). Her work is held in significant collections, including Australian War Memorial, Canberra; Melbourne Museum, Melbourne; Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Melbourne; Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne; Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), Albury; State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Sydney; University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney; Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool; Shepparton Art Museum (SAM), Shepparton; Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne; Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Horsham. She is represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne, Australia.
