HAYLEY MILLAR BAKER — SHE WAS LIKE THE LIZARD THAT FELL INTO THE WATER AND BECAME A CROCODILE

Vivien Anderson Gallery is proud to present a new exhibition of photographic assemblages by Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung artist Hayley Millar Baker (b. Melbourne 199O).

She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile works with Country through photographs that are cut, reassembled, and sutured into collaged forms. The seams have been left open; the ruptures are central to each work.

Observing the landscapes becomes a meditation on responsibility and on the uneasy coexistence of care, complicity, and inherited harm. The collages return the act of looking back onto the viewer. To engage with them is to confront one’s position within ongoing colonial systems and to acknowledge the violences that remain embedded in the land and in the structures that shape it.

To look to the land is to feel the weight of what has been done to it, while recognising how it continues to nourish, restore, and strengthen. Looking demands attentiveness and accountability, insisting on the ethical and relational dimensions of vision itself.

The images collaged throughout She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile combine photographs taken by the artist on unceded Country in south-western Victoria over the past decade—across the lands of the Wauthaurong, Bunurong, Wadawurrung, and Gunditjmara—with archival material sourced from the State Library of Victoria of the same areas. The archival images, produced exclusively by white colonial settler photographers, documented and mapped the land, creating visual records that both precede and actively participate in the colonial inscription of place. By bringing these materials into dialogue, the work creates a confrontation between lived Indigenous presence and the extractive logic of the colonial archive.