Hayley Miller | Artist Portfolio
Ceramics
1: Monster Facsimile
This school task was designed to test a student's ability to replicate a famous sculpture to better our understanding of what makes a monster monstrous. I chose the “Pointy Blue Head” sculpture by Sri Lankan-born, Sydney-based artist, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. What intrigued me about this piece specifically was its form and use of colour. Aside from trial and error, my main sculpting process consisted of a push and pull technique, pushing the clay into the shape I wanted it to be, whilst pulling it to increase the height of the overall piece. In Ramesh's original piece, the eyes and mouth connect to the hollow interior - something I wished to recreate because of its added aesthetic. I first etched onto the wet clay where the eyes and mouth would be positioned. I flipped my sculpture over and carved out the majority of the sculpture from the bottom up, taking extra care to follow my guidelines and my reference material. To add the distinctive spikes of the piece, I piped the slip onto the base of the sculpture like cake icing. A challenge with this technique was ensuring the slip was soft enough to be piped onto the base while also being solid enough to hold its shape. It was a frustrating and time-consuming method, but well worth the effort!
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I chose two blues for the main colour: “Midnight Blue” and “Arctic Blue”. Application of the glaze was simple, regardless of how small and intricate the spikes were; a simple paintbrush was all I needed to apply my selection of glazes. I used a combination of wet and dry brushing, focusing on dry brushing the white and yellow accents onto my replica sculpture and using it as a tool to blend colours. A small issue I had during this project was the blue colours were both on “extreme” ends of the colour spectrum, this sparked worry in me before firing my glazed project as I anticipated the “Midnight Blue” would be too dark of a base colour and the mix of Artic Blue + White brushed on top would make it look too dusty. In hindsight, testing things first would have given me more confidence in my choices. However, despite my worries, I was very pleased with how my sculpture turned out. My recreation looked pretty much identical to its source material. I am proud of my work, and the grade I received (81%) shows the effort I put into this project.
Original vs Recreation
Original: Ramish M, Nithiyendran. 2018, "Pointy Blue Head"
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Recreation: Hayley B, Miller. 2025, "Moster Facsimile"
2: Abstract Headpeice
My abstract bust sculpture was heavily influenced by the painting style of Piet Mondrian’s “Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow” combined with Pablo Picasso's abstract portrait style. What intrigued me about these two artists was that Pablo Picasso (during the artistic movement of Fauvism) greatly influenced Mondrian as an artist, and therefore had a large impact on Mondrian’s career as well. You can see this artistic influence in many of Mondrian's (and Picasso's) works today. The busted sculpture serves as a representation of the links between these two artists, their connection and shared stylistic choices. Additionally, I loosely based the facial features on a close school friend, which helped with keeping my anatomy grounded before I applied my sculpture's iconic “distorted” appearance.
"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist"
- Pablo Picasso
For me, trying to incorporate two art styles and balance that with the features of a live model blurred the clarity of my artistic vision and the progression of my project for a while. However, once I returned to the source material and decided which elements I wanted to use from which artist, this helped coalesce my ideas into a cohesive design. Overall, I am very pleased with the artistic result, and this coursework bettered my understanding of art history as well as task communication and creative divergence.
Graphic Design
1: The Puffs Poster
I was required to design a theatre poster showcasing the upcoming school stage production “The Puffs” or alternatively known as “Four Uneventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic”, written by Matt Cox. I created this poster in session 2 of year 11, so I was still very new to the concepts of graphic design. This assignment, while I was excited to get working, came with its challenges. The design brief (structured like a client request) came with strict guidelines set by the head of the school's drama department.
I had never worked off an actual request before, only made-up clientele scenarios, so there was a slight feeling of nervousness going into this. On top of that, our assignment posters were to be simultaneously submitted to a competition, with the winner having their poster displayed across the school and public places in Canberra. So there was an increased incentive to adhere to the design brief (as many of my classmates did).
While I filled the brief to deliver a lineless piece of art, I chose not to follow the original colour theme of black, yellow, grey and white. My reasoning behind this choice was that I felt the predetermined colour theme was too hard on the eyes (especially when applied to my lineless drawing style), so I chose to replace the grey and black with hues of blue, which worked nicely with the yellow and whites. In addition to the new colours being easier on the eyes, I also felt that these new colours would emphasise and complement the lineless drawing style I was using for foreground elements (the badger). This risk paid off as my teacher praised my brave and bold colour choices and my ability to tie in elements of Potter themes while still clearly representing the Puff’s storyline. I am really glad I chose to lean into the lineless art style with my poster, as it not only set my work apart from my classmates but also allowed me to explore a style I was unfamiliar with before the assignment. As an artist who’s never used the lineless style before, I think I executed it well.
My poster won first place out of 60 graphic design students (2 classes). Because my poster was the winning design, it was displayed around the school’s halls and various public spaces in Canberra, such as Manuka and Civic. My poster can also be found online when you look up “Narrabundah College Puffs Poster” and was featured in an online article from Her Magazine This is the first time my art was publicly displayed, and I was immensely proud of my achievement.
2: Scrapbook Typography
This piece was an opportunity to develop my typography skills within the task element/theme of “handmade”. The first thing I associated with “handmade” was children doing scrapbooking and collaging. I set about gathering a mix of different letters from a vast array of magazine cutouts and graffiti-esque text. I amalgamated them into my font version so the poster would resemble a child’s scrapbook. I then had the name of my created font glued or stapled onto a page, and decorated it with ripped pages and random stickers.
One challenge I encountered was my inability to find full, cohesive sets of both the upper and lowercase letters for my font type. However, when I went back to my original premise of ‘children and handmade’, I felt it was stylistically appropriate to have a combination of both lower and upper case letters because the font is essentially a reimagining of the type of creativity and writing done by a child, so the inconsistency in capitalisation worked well.
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Initially, I also experienced an issue with the visual hierarchy of the piece with the curation of the font’s representational poster. I felt the additional elements, such as the ripped pages and stickers I added as background elements, made the coloured text pop too much; this was confirmed when I sought second and third opinions from my teacher and friend. I therefore decided to make the background directly touching the letters lighter or darker to contrast the font, lowering the brightness of the text itself. I also changed the opacity of the text to make it softer looking, and found replacement letters for the ones that didn't complement the design. I also added a white line paper effect to the background as opposed to the brown crumpled look I had with my first draft, and played around with many filters to further push that foreground-background contrast. It was a lot of work and experimentation, but I can confidently say the final project is identical to how I envisioned it at the outset. I enjoy looking at every inch of this poster and its rich details, and feel incredibly satisfied with the design.
Visual Arts
1: Etching
This piece was done using a printing method called “etching”, where I took a small metal toothpick and carved my design into a plastic plate. In addition to using this technique, the design brief was that the piece must draw influence from Trent Dalton’s novel, “Boy Swallows Universe”. The ‘Skeleton Dog’ is my interpretation of the protagonist's (Eli Bell) internal trauma and his darkest emotions that serve as his leading motivation throughout the novel. I also wanted to explore the concept of loyalty which was also captured in the book; Eli’s loyalty to his brother, his mother, his father and his friends. Dogs are often symbolic of loyalty and so I chose to use this as my character. In the etching, the dog is floating in the middle of a small pond, the starry night sky floats with him.
This piece draws on a particular section of the book where Eli and his brother August gaze into a moonlit pool. It's here where Eli sees himself, but on an internal level. He reflects on his image while reflecting on his experiences. This section of the book delicately unpacks Eli’s trauma caused by poor decisions and an unsafe childhood. The reason I chose to draw the skeleton of a dog instead of the whole animal is because bones and the concept of feeling “empty” or “devoid of life” (from an emotional standpoint) are very interconnected with the skeletal structure. It visually indicates that while yes you as a person existed, you're not living but parts of your existence remain, similar to how memories and trauma remain within us, perhaps even deep in our bones. This piece worked as a symbolic display of key issues dealt with in the book, traumatic memories and loyalty while serving as a means to hone my etching skills.
2: Linoprint
This session of art making, instructed by my art teacher, had the class focus on several printing techniques and adapt to the differences between them. This specific piece was created during my exploration of Lino Printing, where the artist takes a design that is carved into a linoleum sheet, paints over it with ink, and then presses it onto paper. An additional core element of the task, as set by my teacher, was that the finished piece had to visually address a major political, social, economic or environmental issue that felt important to us personally. ​As someone who grew up riveted by nature documentaries, I chose to focus on climate change and its impact on oceanic lifeforms. My design exhibits a whale drawn in an “x-ray” style, where you can see its body’s outline, but through the visual hierarchy, the viewer's eyes naturally focus on its skeletal structure instead. This was a purposeful decision to highlight the impact oceanic pollution has on our marine life and what our oceans may look like in future if action is not taken to rectify the situation.
Background elements that surround the whale have floating pieces of general plastic trash, which further places emphasis on how our oceans appear to be living but are dying at concerning rates due to humans polluting our oceans. My project is a reflection of a statistic-based article by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released in early 2020. It touches on the decrease in whale populations due to an increase in plastic and litter floating in our waters and other problematic human-caused issues that are negatively impacting our seas.
