One heard voices, another saw her future. Their art will unnerve you

Sydney Morning Herald

3 days ago

When she was a little girl, Hayley Millar Baker would cover her ears with her long dark hair before falling asleep. She did so as a sign that she was unavailable to the spirit world. It was her way of saying, 'I'm not up for talking, I don't want to hear you tonight', she tells me when we meet at Buxton Contemporary gallery in Melbourne.
It's a habit she continues to this day. Millar Baker hears voices, feels presences, astral travels. This awareness of a realm beyond the physical is not something she can control. Perhaps sensing my reserve about the possibility of such things, she looks at me with her remarkably bright hazel eyes and asks 'Do you believe in ghosts?'
I fumble for an answer and settle for 'I don't know'.
Millar Baker, who has Aboriginal heritage on her mother's side (Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung peoples) and Anglo-Indian and Portuguese-Brazilian ancestry on her father's side, has delved into the paranormal in her three short films – Nyctinasty (2021), The Umbra (2023), and her latest, Eternity the Butterfly. All three films are screening together for the first time in the veil exhibition at Buxton Contemporary, conceived by First Nations curator Hannah Presley. Indeed, Millar Baker's films and the concepts they explore are the impetus for the exhibition, which has been two years in the making and features the work of six female artists, four of them Indigenous.
'I approached Hayley about her next film and what her plans were and we started talking about Eternity the Butterfly, which now has a title and exists, but then was in the very early planning stages,' Presley says. 'We locked in the commission, and then I started to think, Hayley has two previous films, and the ideas across the films were really my inspiration to build the entire exhibition.'
The exhibition deals with themes such as the importance of emotion, of instinct and ritual, of Indigenous knowledge and spirituality, and even of magic in a world that tends to privilege the rational.
For Aboriginal people, 'the land is alive, the spirit world is a given', says Presley.
In its premiere screening, Eternity the Butterfly is the exhibition's masterwork, shown across a nine-metre screen. Like Millar Baker's two previous films, it is beautifully austere, wryly haunting, subtly political. She sets her films in impeccable architectural spaces that jar with the mysterious happenings that take place within them. Filmed in black and white, her short films evoke the works of Hitchcock on the one hand, with their film-noir edge, and Bill Viola's mystical video art on the other, with its references to religious iconography and Renaissance paintings.
It doesn't surprise me that Millar Baker is a fan of horror, but I'm intrigued to hear that Quentin Tarantino is another inspiration. She loves his 'long-winded' scenes, such as the opening of 2009's Inglourious Basterds, where the psychological tension mounts to a terrifying climax as a menacingly polite Nazi officer tries to outmanoeuvre a French farmer who is hiding a Jewish family under his house. Like Tarantino, Millar Baker is unafraid to linger over a scene, to build tension through the simplest of gestures.
Loading
Eternity the Butterfly is set in the stunningly minimal 'House at Big Hill', near Victoria's Great Ocean Road, designed by Kerstin Thompson Architects. In a striking performance, Georgia Mokak, who is not a professional actor (none of the actors in Millar Baker's films are), plays Eternity, a goddess-like being, who enters a meditative state and conjures ancestor spirit guides, calling them at one point with deep guttural sounds. The film's title references the life cycle of the butterfly, and its constant evolution, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly to egg, over and over, which in turn speaks of the persistence and survival of Aboriginal culture in the face of historic efforts to suppress and destroy it.
The film was about a year in the writing, another six months in post-production: 'All the scenes came to me in dreams, so that was a waiting game,' Millar Baker says.
She likes to create works slowly, letting the ideas form intuitively, a method that she says is counter to the way the arts often operate in Melbourne – fast-paced and competitive.
Millar Baker's past photographic work has alluded to ghostly encounters, while leaving open the possibility that the disturbing voices and noises she heard as a child could have been a play of the imagination, a warp of memory, or an idea planted by a trusted elder to encourage awareness and prevent her from 'straying too far from the pack', as she puts it.
But it was only in Nyctinasty, commissioned by Hetty Perkins for 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony at the National Gallery of Australia in 2022, that Millar Baker explicitly acknowledged her connection to the spirit world. She stars as a woman, alone at night in an elegant contemporary home, who performs a series of rituals that evoke the ways in which Aboriginal people care for the body and spirit after death. She bathes, tends an open fire, applies charcoal to her hands before lying back on a couch, eyes closed, summoning. A sense of foreboding pervades the film and builds to a startling final scene. Millar Baker had just had her second child when she made the film, which adds another layer to this story about the cycles of birth and death.
Comparable themes are explored in the works of Lena Yarinkura, a senior weaver from Maningrida who has made two gloriously large and intricate fibre sculptures inspired by creation stories; Glenda Nicholls (Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri and Yorta Yorta) a master weaver who makes vast hanging nets, hand-woven from jute and decorated with feather flowers; Lisa Waup, who has screen-printed 365 hessian sandbags that allude to floods and waterways affected by climate change and colonisation; and Hannah Gartside, who creates sculptures from found fabrics and cast-off clothes.
The exhibition also marks the first time that the work of Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska is being shown in Australia. Presley and Millar Baker were deeply affected by Grzeszykowska's photographic series, Mama, when they saw it together at the Venice Biennale in 2022. When Presley began working on the veil, she and Millar Baker immediately thought of inviting Grzeszykowska to take part.
'I was very happy of course,' Grzeszykowska tells me via Zoom from her home in Warsaw. 'I really admire the works in the exhibition because the art is so true, so I'm kind of proud that my work fits this, and I really like this intercultural context.'
Mama is an eerie, darkly humorous and disturbing series of photographs of Grzeszykowska's daughter Franciszka, who was then seven years old, playing with an uncannily life-like and life-size bust of her mother. Franciszka bathes this artificial mother figure, hugs it, gives it a cigarette, paints its face, takes it down to a river bank in a trolley cart, swims with it, and eventually buries it. Like Millar Baker's films, the series evolved organically, the idea revealing itself over time.
Grzeszykowska had ordered a bust of herself from a company that makes props for films. She documented the process – an interesting exercise, as it was the first time she could view 'herself' from behind a camera. But this documentation didn't seem strong enough for a finished artwork. So she took the bust home, put it in her living room, and went about her daily chores while she thought about what she might do with it.
'After a few weeks I noticed that my daughter started to play with it. She was combing its hair and she was dressing it up, she was really treating this object as if it was a doll,' Grzeszykowska says.
The role of mother and child was reversed. The resulting photographs are psychologically unsettling and imbued with a haunting sense of mortality. The mother figure may not be real, but the complex emotions that the photographs stir certainly are.
'I must admit there are some photographs in the series which are more intense, even for me,' Grzeszykowska says.
One of them is the photograph of Franciszka washing the doll in the bathtub. Grzeszykowska's bathroom is small, so she had to shoot the photographs from a mirror on the opposite wall of the bath.
'This picture is amazing,' she says, 'because when I saw it seemed to me that I was looking into the future.'
As the curator who has brought these artists and their distinctly different mediums together, Presley says it's rare in Australia for the work of a senior weaver such as Lena Yarinkura to be exhibited alongside that of a Polish feminist photographer. But these are exactly the kinds of connections and juxtapositions that she feels are important for Indigenous artists.
'We're at a stage where we've got these really established artists that need to communicate with other artists,' Presley says.
There's a lot to absorb in this quietly expansive exhibition, and when I come to writing this piece, I'm not sure how or where to start. The words come to me in my sleep: When she was a little girl, Hayley Millar Baker would cover her ears with her long dark hair before falling asleep.