Archives, often incomplete with gaps and silences, offer evidence for historians’ linear arguments. But expanding the archive’s meaning to various forms can reshape our approach to history and memory. Artist Diana Baker Smith explores this, using performance to access and embody memories through site-specific responses.
This Place Where They Dwell is a major new commission by Baker Smith and is filmed and presented in artist Margo Lewers’ former home, now Lewers House at Penrith Regional Gallery. The 4-channel video installation unpacks traces of Lewers’ life, using performance and sound in collaboration with choreographer and performer Lizzie Thomson and composer and soprano Jane Sheldon.
Upon first accessing our archive, Baker Smith was drawn to the documentation of Lewers’ last ever exhibition, held at the Adelaide Convention centre in 1976. The exhibition included several paintings on unstretched canvas and fabrics, hung from the ceiling as if they were drapes, or sails, creating a dynamic interplay between colour, light, and for the first time, three-dimensional movement.
Accompanying the installation was a choreographed dance by Marylin Wood, a performance that was said to have moved Lewers to tears as she witnessed her work activated in this way. For This Place Where They Dwell, Baker Smith and her collaborator Thomson echo Woods’ methodology of ‘scoring the site,’ tracing the sounds, rhythm, and architecture of the rooms where Lewers lived with her family, and then alone for almost three decades of her life.
In the work, Thomson moves as if there is a slow and important puzzle to solve, with light and colour as her guide. A singular voice carries four notes across the house without pause. For Baker Smith the reflective ritualistic movement of Thomson’s body and Sheldon’s minimalist composition, act like other archives, as they take on the character of a collection of stories and movements that recall historical narratives.
For Baker Smith, reviving the works of overlooked women artists is both resistance and a challenge to traditional remembrance. This Place Where They Dwell addresses historical gaps with poetic urgency, manifesting memory as movement, colour, and sound.
read the curatorial essay here
Artist: Diana Baker Smith
Performer: Lizzie Thomson
Cinematographer: Nisa East
Composer: Jane Sheldon
Costume Designer: Leah Giblin
Video Editor: Kate Blackmore
Sound Mix: Bob Scott
Colourist: Justin Tran
Edit Assistant: Eloise Martin-Jones
Production Assistant: Amy Prcevich
Diana Baker Smith
Diana Baker Smith is an artist who works at the intersection of performance and moving image. Her artistic practice examines the politics of art history through methods of archival research, collaboration, embodiment, and fiction. She lives on Gadigal land in Sydney and is a Lecturer in the School of Art & Design at the University of New South Wales.
Baker Smith’s recent solo exhibitions include Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void) at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2024), She Speaks in Sculpture at UTS Art Gallery (2022), The Lost Hour at Contemporary Art Tasmania (2022), and Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion at Artspace (2021). She is a founding member of the art collective Barbara Cleveland, whose works are held in collections including Artbank, Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, Monash University Museum of Art and Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art. Baker Smith’s solo and collaborative works have been presented as part of major group exhibitions including Circles of Dialogue, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo (2023); Know My Name: Australian Women Artists at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2021); Australia: Antipodean Stories at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2020); the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Divided Worlds (2018); and the 20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed (2016).
