Hayley Millar Baker – She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile, 2025

The series She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile is assembled from fragments of different places, sutured into landscapes that never existed as single views. She prefers to think of them not as landscapes but as “portals”: small sites of ritual, instruction and return. Saturated in red, the works hold violence and kinship, rupture and endurance in unresolved tension. Made from photographs taken on unceded Country and material drawn from colonial archives, they emerged through a daily practice of cutting, aligning and splicing images. Millar Baker argues that “to engage with them is to confront one’s position within ongoing colonial systems and to acknowledge the violence that remains embedded in the land and in the systems that have fractured its sovereignty”

Image-making in Hayley Millar Baker’s practice reflects the entanglement of history, memory and experience. Grounded in Wiradjuri Country, she works with photography, film and digital composition. Drawing equally from family narratives, colonial archives and contemporary life, she examines the formation, transmission and contestation of narratives. These compositions resist resolution into a single perspective, instead holding multiple viewpoints in relation, where individual experience and collective histories remain intertwined.

La Biennale de Lyon acknowledges all First Nations peoples of Australia, their Traditional Custodians of the lands, and Elders past and present. We honour the enduring strength, diversity, and richness of First Nations artistic and cultural practices. We recognise First Nations peoples as Australia’s first artists, whose creative traditions have been sustained across millennia and continue to shape the Nation’s cultural landscape today.