There we were all in one place

Publication Details Paperback, 23 x 17cm, 80 pages, 37 image plates. ISBN: 978-0-6481354-9-4

Author and/or Editor name/s Stella Rosa McDonald (author and editor), Hetti Perkins (author), Vicki Couzens (author), Talia Smith (author)

Author and/or Editor bio/s Stella Rosa McDonald is Curator, UTS Gallery & Art Collection. Talia Smith is an artist and curator from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is of Cook Island, Samoan and NZ European heritage. Her curatorial and visual art practice examines concepts of time, memory and ruin, and she is current Curator at Granville Centre Art Gallery. Hetti Perkins is a curator, writer and presenter, and member of Arrernte and Kalkadoon communities. Hetti has worked with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual art for over thirty years and is Senior Curator (at large), National Gallery of Australia. Vicki Couzens is a member of the Keerray Wooroong language group of the Gunditjmara of western Victoria, and has worked in Aboriginal community affairs for over forty years. She is Senior Knowledge Custodian for Possum Skin Cloak Story and Language Reclamation and Revival in her Keerray Wooroong Mother Tongue.

Year of Publication 2021

Publisher UTS Gallery & Art Collection, Sydney

Abstract There we were all in one place is an early career survey exhibition by Hayley Millar Baker (Gunditjmara, AU), initiated by UTS Gallery in 2021 and touring in the University Art Museum network in 2022. From 2016 to 2019 Hayley Millar Baker produced five photographic series. Made almost exclusively in black and white, the photographs use historical re-appropriation and citation, in tandem with digital editing and archival research, to consider human experiences of time, memory and place.

Millar Baker’s layered photographic assemblages affirm Aboriginal experience and culture within the Australian Imaginary to form a complex image narrative of place, family, identity and survival. Her work is informed by her Gunditjmara and cross-cultural heritage, grounded in research of the historical archive, and guided by a non-linear form of storytelling that sees past, present and future as an unbroken continuum.

Curated by Stella Rosa McDonald, There we were all in one place brings these five bodies of work together for the first time to consider the ways in which Millar Baker uses photography and storytelling to re-author history and assert the authority of memory and experience across generations.

There we were all in one place was extended by a catalogue with full work reproductions and essays by exhibition curator Stella Rosa McDonald, curators Hetti Perkins and Talia Smith and a commissioned poem in language by poet and artist Vicki Couzens.

Also included in the catalogue is a Learning Experience designed by Emily McDaniel, in consultation with the artist. Aimed at tertiary students across disciplines, the experience is designed to facilitate the development of personal connections to the work of Hayley Millar Baker and encourages participants to reflect on their own personal experiences, memories and understandings in relation to the themes and stories represented in the exhibition.