Entr’acte channels the internal feelings of restrained rage and its transformation into grief, rippling through the body and permeating all levels of the self. Taking its title from the French word ‘Entr’acte’ – referring to an interlude performed between two acts of a play – the work centres a female protagonist cast as a vessel symbolising ‘woman’ who is holding the inequitable weight women are forced to carry and contend with daily, across the multitude of experiences, identities, and roles they play. Entr’acte simultaneously embraces notions of intimacy and intensity to convey the monumental focus, determination, and power of women, capturing the moment after an action and before a reaction, or external rupture. Neither documentary, nor fiction, Entr’acte raises a pertinent social commentary about the expectations forced on women – mourning the loss of free expression in a world of social and cultural inequity.

‘The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.’ – Leslie Jamison, 20141

Are you a morning or a night person? I am a night person, I do my best thinking at night, but I have children who are up at 5am. So, I’m forced to be a morning person too.

Is there a sound or song that prompts a where or when for you? The Cure, ‘Close to Me’. For me that is the one of the songs of my childhood, dancing and singing in the lounge room with my cousins and Aunties.

Is there something you’ve always collected? When I was younger, I used to collect mini Buddhas I don’t know why / I throw out things that no longer serve the time I am in.

Where do you feel the most connected / where do you feel the most disconnected? Most connected in my dreams / least connected in the physical world.

What scares you the most right now / what inspires you? I’ve recently learnt I’m scared of earthquakes since the two earthquakes in Victoria in the past year / Art history inspires me, it’s where I look to when I need to get a fresh perspective.

Through the process of making your new commission for Between Waves, what has been revealed and/or become more obscured? The thing that has become clearest to me through the process of making this commission, is that no matter what I thought I wanted the work to be, the work had its own idea of what it needed to be, which was a bit scary. I had all these grand ideas and then none of that worked and it just needed to be what it wanted to be. I have never worked in that way, never put a strait cut into anything. The work needed to be what the work needed to be, and I had to lean into that.

1. Leslie Jamison, ‘The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2014, Vol. 90, part 2, 2014, viewed 8 June 2023, https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-uni- fied-theory-female-pain.

born 1990, Naarm/Melbourne
lives and works on Boonwurrung and Wathaurong Country, Victoria

Hayley Millar Baker is a Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung woman, and multidisciplinary lens-based contemporary artist. Examining the role identities play in translating and conveying our experiences, Millar Baker works across photography, collage, and film to interrogate and make abstract the autobiographical narratives and themes relating to her own identity. Her oblique storytelling methods convey the passage of identity, culture, and memory as non-linear, and non-fixed.

Millar Baker’s background in painting and photography has informed her most recent filmic works, Nyctinasty 2022, commissioned for CEREMONY: 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and The Umbra 2023 which premiered in Shadow Spirit for Rising Festival, Melbourne, 2023.

In 2021-22, Millar Baker presented her first early career-survey exhibition There we were all in one place at UTS Gallery, Sydney, that brought together five pivotal bodies of work from Millar Baker’s early career for the first time and has since toured nationally. Millar Baker has also exhibited as part of Primavera 2018: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Millar Baker was awarded the John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship for the National Photography Prize in 2020, the Darebin Art Prize, 2019, and The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize Special Commendation Award, 2017. Millar Baker has been a finalist in several prestigious national art prizes including; Ramsay Art Prize, 2019 and 2021, Bowness Photography Prize, 2021, John Fries Award, 2019, and international prizes including Italy’s Arte Laguna Prize, Arsenale Nord, 2023; Hong Kong’s Sovereign Asian Art Prize, 2021; and United Arab Emirates’ Vantage Point Sharjah 9, 2021.

Millar Baker has been awarded several residencies, most recently the Artist-in-residence at Monash University Prato, Italy, 2022, and has featured in a range of festival-based exhibition projects including PHOTO2021: International Festival of Photography, 2021, TELL: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, International Ballarat Foto Biennale, 2017, and Tarnanthi: Festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Contemporary Art, 2017.

Hayley Millar Baker is represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne, Australia.