Hayley Millar Baker’s work is politically engaged, spiritually resonant, and deeply human, revealing the cyclical, interconnected, and regenerative nature of Aboriginal worlds.

Hayley Millar Baker is an Aboriginal Australian contemporary artist (Gunditjimara and Djabwurrung) and of Anglo-Indian descent. Drawing on ancestral knowledge and Indigenous philosophies of being, her work engages cosmological and symbolic frameworks that shape Indigenous worlds. Through this engagement, she creates spaces for reflection, reclamation, and connection across embodied, spiritual, and environmental experience.

Central to her practice are the emotional and psychological landscapes of Indigenous women. Her work affirms their strength and enduring presence as fundamental to the transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge. Rather than positioning women as subjects of interpretation, her practice asserts them as sovereign presences whose knowledge systems continue to shape and unsettle contemporary cultural realities.

Her approach is characterised by deliberate obfuscation, moving between concealing and revealing as both method and ethic. These gestures resist immediate clarity, asking viewers to slow down, listen, and remain with uncertainty. In this way, the work cultivates relational modes of knowing that mirror the enduring, non-linear transmission of Indigenous knowledge itself.

“Millar Baker’s encrypted images purposefully elude easy categorisation. They are cinematic, documentary, archival, and surreal still-lifes that resist a narrow view of what it means to live as an Aboriginal person in Australia.”

– Hetti Perkins, curator, cultural adviser, writer, and activist.

In 2025, Hayley was shortlisted for the Australian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, in collaboration with curator Erin Vink. In 2018, she was selected as one of eight artists for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) Primavera: Young Australian Artists.

Hayley’s work has been prominently featured in numerous major group and solo exhibitions both locally and internationally. These exhibitions include esteemed institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, The Art Gallery of NSW, The National Gallery of Art (USA), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (USA), Art Gallery of South Australia, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Al Hamriyah Studios (UAE), Artspace Sydney, and SAMSTAG Museum.