Hayley Millar Baker: I Will Survive

Image of people walking past a digital screen on the side of a construction site. Text on screens reads 'I Will Survive' — Photo by Kit Edwards

Image of two people walking past screen displaying two black and white photographs. — Photo by Kit Edwards

Image of people sitting on the Fed Square steps. In the background is a digital screens displaying two black and white photographs. — Photo by Kit Edwards

Image of two people looking at two black and white photographs on a digital screen. — Photo by Kit Edwards

Image of the Fed Square with people sitting on the steps. In the background is the Town Hall construction site with two screens installed on the construction hoarding displaying two black and white photographs. — Photo by Kit Edwards

About the artwork

To celebrate YIRRAMBOI Festival – Australia’s premier First Nations arts and cultural event – the Metro Tunnel Creative Program is displaying Hayley Millar Baker's artwork I Will Survive on the 2 large screens facing into Fed Square.

'I Will Survive is concerned with stories of caution, superstition and survival in the bush, that were passed on to me as a child. These cautions came in the form of warnings, myths, stories of ghosts, and hauntings from my Aboriginal and migrant parents and grandparents,' says Baker.

About the artist

Hayley Millar Baker is a Gunditjmara Djabwurrung artist, born in Melbourne. 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.

This artwork was commissioned by PHOTO Australia for PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography.