In She Was Like the Lizard That Fell into the Water and Became a Crocodile, Hayley Millar Baker engages with Country through photographic collage, cutting, reassembling, and suturing images into layered compositions. Seams are deliberately left visible; rupture is not resolved but positioned as central to each work.

Her treatment of landscape becomes a meditation on responsibility, tracing the uneasy coexistence of care, complicity, and inherited harm. The collages return the gaze to the viewer, prompting a confrontation with one’s position within ongoing colonial systems and an acknowledgement of the violences embedded in both land and its governing structures.

Across the series, the land registers the weight of what has been done to it, while retaining its capacity to nourish, restore, and sustain. Looking is framed as an ethical act, requiring attentiveness and accountability, and foregrounding the relational conditions through which vision is shaped.

Hayley Millar Baker (b. Melbourne 1990) is a Gunditjmara, Djabwurrung, and Anglo-Indian artist based in the outer western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.

Hayley Millar Baker, She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile 9, 2025, archival ink-jet print, 20.5 x 15 cm