Diana Baker Smith
This Place Where They Dwell
2024
Four channel 4K video
5:15 minutes

Choreographer and Performer: Lizzie Thomson
Composer and Soprano: Jane Sheldon
Cinematographer: Nisa East
Costume Designer: Leah Giblin
Sound Mix: Bob Scott
Colourist: Justin Tran
Edit Assistant: Eloise Martin-Jones
Production Assistant: Amy Prcevich

This Place Where They Dwell is a major new commission by Diana Baker Smith. Through performance, installation and film, Baker Smith considers the idea of the home and the archive interchangeably, as repositories for the traces of our lived experiences.

This Place Where They Dwell was performed and filmed in the former home of Gerald and Margo Lewers – a home that has since become a regional gallery through the Lewers Bequest in 1980. Baker Smith examines the home as if it were an artwork or cultural object in an archive, considering its former use and current function as a public gallery.  With a sensory approach to colour and light, a wholistic view of Margo Lewers’ life is created, reflecting on her movements, motivations, and existence in a home where she lived for almost three decades.

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This project was commissioned by Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest. The project has been assisted by UNSW Art & Design and the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

Diana Baker Smith, This Place Where They Dwell, 2024 production images and video stills. Photographer: Lucy Parakhina.

Diana Baker Smith
Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void)
2024
Wall Painting and Live Performance

Dancers: Emma Fishwick, Isabella Stone
Choreography: Diana Baker Smith, Sofie Burgoyne
Textile consultation: Leah Giblin
Design assistance: Zoe Gojnich and Kate Polkingorne
Clothing: Kowtow

Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void) is the second Judy Wheeler Commission, PICA’s annual series of site-specific works that respond to the history and site of PICA. For this new commission, Baker Smith presents a graphic score and live performance in response to PICA’s first-floor mezzanine level, otherwise known as the ‘void’.

Painted across the walls of the mezzanine, Baker Smith’s score draws on PICA’s archive of architectural plans and photographs of the building, particularly from the time of its 1991 transformation from a technical college into its present-day role as a contemporary art space. The score’s shapes indicate the original location of different architectural features. Ellipses (represented by three dots) signify where doorways and windows once were, straight lines stand for architraves and handrails, while elliptical broken lines allude to the perpetual movement of time and history, where the past is continually made present. Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void) prompts audiences to consider the particularities of this distinctive space and directs our attention towards its historical layers, architectural interventions and reconfigurations.

The title of the work, Falling Towards Another, is drawn from German philosopher Karl Marx’s model of dialectical logic, referencing the elliptical motion of planets: ‘It is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another and at the same time constantly flying away from it.’ Guided by the graphic score, these two tendencies of motion form the basis of the push-pull movements of two dancers during a live performance around the void.

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The 2024 Judy Wheeler Commission is made possible by the generosity of the Simpson Family.

Installation view and performance, Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void), Judy Wheeler Commission, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 2024. Photo: Daniel Grant.

Diana Baker Smith and Kate Blackmore
Brief Illuminations Between Interruptions
2022
Single channel 4K video
13:12 minutes

Cinematographer: Nisa East
Photographer: Anna Hay
Sound Recordist: Ingrid Rowell
Costume Designer: Leah Giblin
Hair & Makeup: Leila El Rayes
Production Coordinator: Jade Muratore
Composer: Kelly Ryall
Sound Design & Mix: Bob Scott
Colourist: Justin Tran
Edit Assistant: Angelique Pham

Brief Illuminations Between Interruptions is a film about motherhood, artistic labour and female friendship. The work is a record of a dialogue, unfolding across two years, between artists Diana Baker Smith and Kate Blackmore. Together, they reflect on the complexities of motherhood, the politics of care and their shared experience of becoming pregnant at 40.

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This project was commissioned by Ngunungulla for the Video Commission exhibition, curated by Megan Monte and Milena Stojanovska. It received additional support from UNSW Art & Design, and the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Diana Baker Smith
She Speaks in Sculpture
2022
Two channel 4K video
9:35 minutes

Performance: Ivey Wawn
Choreography: Brooke Stamp
Sound Composition: Bree van Reyk
Costume Design: Leah Giblin
Cinematography: Gotaro Uematsu
Second Camera: Kate Blackmore
Editing: Kate Blackmore
Sound Mix: Bob Scott
Sound Editing: Serge Stanley
Colourist: Justin Tran
Edit Assistance: Annie Zhang
Production: Jade Muratore
Production Assistance: April Mountford and Alia Patterson

She Speaks in Sculpture explores the politics of art and civic histories through the work of Australian-American artist Margel Hinder (1906-1995). Diana Baker Smith’s video focuses on the story of Hinder’s modernist sculpture, Growth Forms, 1958-59.

Conceived for a building on Sydney’s Pitt Street, Hinder’s work was never intended to move, yet has been relocated many times—subject to forces of cultural aspiration and urban development in the city. At one point, Growth Forms was cut up and nearly sold for scrap metal, before being salvaged and welded back together by Hinder.

She Speaks in Sculpture reimagines the narratives surrounding Growth Forms through performance, recalling Hinder’s preoccupation with “the elusive fourth dimension—movement”. Across two screens, a choreography unfolds: between Baker Smith’s archival investigations, the careful transit of Growth Forms to its present location at the University of Technology Sydney, and Ivey Wawn’s dancing body, communing with the sculpture and the urban landscapes where it once stood. Wawn maps the work’s contours with her body, reinscribing it as a presence and an absence through dance. Other scenes reveal how the sculpture has been pulled apart through a suite of archival traces, handled by Baker Smith in her role as artist, art historian, detective and witness.

In telling the story of Growth Forms through its movement between locations and contexts, Baker Smith embodies and reanimates Hinder’s work in the present. Just as Growth Forms sought to invoke a world in motion, She Speaks in Sculpture reflects a city forever in flux: shaped by cycles of deconstruction and renewal, collective remembering and forgetting.

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This project has been supported by the City of Sydney’s Cultural and Creative Grants and UNSW Art & Design.

Installation view, She Speaks in Sculpture, UTS Gallery, Sydney, 2022. Photo: Zan Wimberley.

Diana Baker Smith
Movement Reconstructions No 1-3
2022
Pigment print on cotton rag paper
54 x 81cm
Photographer: Lucy Parakhina

With the photographic series Movement Reconstructions, Diana Baker Smith depicts the choreography of a sculpture: Margel Hinder’s monumental Growth Forms, 1958-59. Originally conceived for a building on Sydney’s Pitt Street, this large-scale modernist work sought to evoke those unseen energies that propel the world. While the sculpture was never intended to move, it has been relocated many times over the years, subject to forces of cultural aspiration and urban development in the city.

Two of Baker Smith’s photographs depict an intricate maquette of Growth Forms, Hinder’s experiment combining geometry and poetry, which she cradles carefully in gloved hands. The third image reveals a section of the sculpture in closeup, its stippled surface crisscrossed with ratchet straps, secured in a stillage—in transit to a new location in the University of Technology Sydney.

With Movement Reconstructions Baker Smith reveals the gentle acts of care and (often invisible) labour involved in making and maintaining a sculpture. Even one such as Growth Forms, which at first glance is characterised by its weight and durability.

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This project has been supported by the City of Sydney’s Cultural and Creative Grants and UNSW Art & Design.

Installation view, She Speaks in Sculpture, UTS Gallery, Sydney, 2022. Photo: Zan Wimberley.

Diana Baker Smith
The Lost Hour
2021
Single Channel HD Video
15:50 minutes

Videography: Kate Blackmore and Robert Nugent
Video Editing: Diana Baker Smith
Sound Composition: Bree van Reyk
Sound Mix: Bob Scott
Colourist: Julien Chichignoud
Voice Over: Diana Baker Smith, Kate Blackmore and Fernando do Campo
Recollections: Grame E. BrownAleks Danko, Julie Ewington, Stephen Jones, Greg Schiemer

The Lost Hour is a video essay exploring the significant yet relatively unknown artist and dancer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75). The work reflects on how art, and its engagements with archives, can help us remember Australian conceptual artworks in the present. It focuses on Cullen’s performance, 24-Hour Concert (1974), which involved over 30 artists from across Australia – many of whom are now major figures. Visiting the sites where Cullen staged the performance, and where her archives now reside, Baker Smith performs embodied acts of remembering and misremembering, acknowledging that many of Cullen’s archives have deteriorated or been lost. Grappling with Cullen’s elusiveness in Australian art history, Baker Smith gestures toward alternative methods for valuing her practice and writing art history.

This project was funded and supported by NSW Government in association with Create NSW.

Diana Baker Smith with Brooke Stamp
The One Hour Concert
2021
Single Channel 4K Video
9.30 minutes

Performance and Choreography: Brooke Stamp
Cinematography: Emma Paine
Video Editing: Diana Baker Smith
Sound Composition: Miles Brown
Sound Mix: Bob Scott
Colourist: Julien Chichignoud

The One Hour Concert is part of a series of works exploring the archive of the Australian artist, choreographer and dancer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75). Made in collaboration with choreographer Brooke Stamp, this video reanimates Cullen’s 1974 participatory work 24 Hour Concert, and gestures to a performance that was never realised in her lifetime.

Taking place at one of the key sites where 24 Hour Concert took place—once a gallery, now a boutique tailor— the camera observes as Stamp enacts a series of choreographed actions. Her intuitive movement vocabulary draws from various sources: the accounts of those who were there, performance documentation, scores and notes found in Cullen’s archive. While researching 24 Hour Concert, Baker Smith discovered that the event happened on the first day of daylight savings, which meant it fell short of its intended duration. And the plan to make up this lost time—by staging an hour-long concert the following year—never came to fruition.

Baker Smith’s The One Hour Concert takes Cullen’s work, and the stories swirling around it, as a place from which to begin. Through collaborative gestures, this video suggests that, while traces disappear, they may still be embodied and performed through strategies of intergenerational care, rewriting and reimagining. With a commitment to speculative reinvention—as a way to carry the past into the present—The One Hour Concert embraces and tests the generative capacities of Philippa Cullen’s archive.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; by the NSW Government through Create NSW; and UNSW Art and Design.

Diana Baker Smith
The One Hour Concert (Hobart)
2022
Live Performance
60 minutes

Performers: Sofie Burgoyne and Wendy Morrow
Musician: Jon Smeathers

The One Hour Concert (Hobart) is part of a series of works exploring the archive of the Australian artist, choreographer and dancer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75).

While researching Cullen’s 24 Hour Concert, 1974, Baker Smith learned this participatory performance took place on the day when clocks are put forward for daylight savings—meaning it ran for only 23 hours. A second, hour-long concert was planned for the following year to make up for the lost time, but Cullen died before this could happen.

This story, and Cullen’s work, were the starting point for Baker Smith’s improvisational performance, The One Hour Concert (Hobart), made in collaboration with dancers Wendy Morrow, Sofie Burgoyne and musician Jon Smeathers. Across its sixty-minute duration, the dancers embodied and reimagined gestures drawn from 24 Hour Concert, encountered through documentation, performance instructions, and other archival traces. With The One Hour Concert (Hobart), Baker Smith grapples with Cullen’s elusiveness, while gesturing toward alternative methods: for valuing her practice and rewriting art history.

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Installation view, The One Hour Concert (Hobart), Diana Baker Smith with Sofie Burgoyne Wendy Morrow and Jon Smeathers, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart 2022. Photo: Rèmi Chauvin.

Diana Baker Smith with Ella Sutherland
The One Hour Concert: Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion
2021
Screenprint on Fabriano Rosaspina paper
70 x 50cm

The One Hour Concert: Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion is part of series of works exploring the archive of the Australian artist, choreographer and dancer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75).

This limited edition poster, made in collaboration with artist and designer Ella Sutherland, is a gesture towards a performance that was never realised in Cullen’s lifetime. While this screenprint is new, the simple typeface, graphic shapes and vibrant colours reference posters made to advertise Cullen’s performances in the 1970s. In the speculative act of bringing the past into the present, Baker Smith embraces and tests the generative capacities of Cullen’s archive.

First exhibited as part of ‘Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion,’ curated by Bree Richards, 2021. Installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley.

Diana Baker Smith with Samuel Hodge
The Drama of Hands
2021
Pigment print on cotton rag paper
54 x 80cm

The Drama of Hands is part of series of works exploring the archive of the Australian artist, choreographer and dancer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75).

The work’s title is taken from a handwritten note Baker Smith found in Cullen’s papers at the National Library of Australia. In The Drama of Hands, Baker Smith holds a photograph of her holding a photograph of yet another photograph: Cullen dancing during her 24 Hour Concert (1974). In this performative work, Baker Smith responds to Cullen’s call for “the drama of hands” to reflect on her tactile relations to the dancer’s archive and embodied ways of doing art history.

“The doubling effect of hands holding a picture of hands holding a photograph, might, in a way, be considered an enactment of Cullen’s score The Drama of Hands. It is also a way to ‘touch’ history, drawing lines of connection between then and now. The lived and the archived interact here through many forms of again-ness: what the photograph of a single moment from 24 Hour Concert might have meant in relation to its specific context in 1974, and what it might mean for us, in the present.”

Bree Richards, Turning and Returning: Diana Baker Smith and Philippa Cullen’s 24 Hour Concert, 2021.

‘Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion,’ Diana Baker Smith, curated by Bree Richards, 2021. Installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley.

Diana Baker Smith with Ella Sutherland
Make a Movement
2021
Applied vinyl
Four panels (l-r: 88 x 101cm; 100 x 70.5cm; 88 x 101cm; 99 x 70.5cm)

Make a Movement is part of series of works exploring the archive of the Australian artist, choreographer and dancer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75).

This text work is a re-approximation of one of Cullen’s instructional scores Right Durations. Arranged as they are, the words – dancing across the windows outside Artspace – appear to enact this proposition while at the same time declaring it.

‘Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion,’ Diana Baker Smith, curated by Bree Richards, 2021. Installation view, Ideas Platform, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley.

Diana Baker Smith and Verónica Tello
Opening Night (the order of arrangements)
2020
Single Channel HD Video
17:15 minutes

Music Composition: Bree van Reyk
Text Design: Ella Sutherland
Videography: Sam Cooper
Video Editing: Diana Baker Smith
Sound Mix: Bob Scott
Colourist: Julien Chichignoud

The video essay Opening Night (The Order of Arrangements) focuses on the National Gallery of Australia, and its opening night which took place October 12, 1982. It reconstructs the opening speeches and the walkthrough of the Australian collection, involving Queen Elizabeth II (Head of State), James Mollison (inaugural Director of the NGA) and Gordon Darling (Chairman of the NGA Council). It analyses the origins of the museum and its foundational rhetoric and values, which celebrate the settler-colonial nation. At the same time, the video shows that while women may be excluded in the collection, they are nonetheless always present. That is, as librarians, art handlers and administrators working ‘behind the scenes’ reproducing the museum. Drawing on the NGA’s archives, including archival footage and sound, the video plays on various forms of reproduction, repetition and re-enactment within the museum’s historiography.

This project was commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia and funded and supported by NSW Government in association with Create NSW and UNSW Art & Design.

Barbara Cleveland (Diana Baker Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley)
2019
Single Channel HD Video
13:28 minutes

Composer: Corin Ileto
Video editing: Kate Blackmore
Colourist: Julien Chichignoud
Sound Mixer: Lachlan Harris

Inspired by the description of the friendship between the two authors Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy as a ‘thinking business for and with each other’, This is a stained glass window enquires into the friendship and 15-year shared intellectual and creative pursuit of Barbara Cleveland. In this work, the collective positions their friendship, their artistic labour and their collaboration as a stained glass window - an accumulated density that exists between them.

Through a self-reflexive video portrait, which draws on the aesthetics and conventions of cinéma vérité, conceptual art and performance documentation, This is a stained glass window traces Barbara Cleveland’s unique working model and their imbricated lives. Exposing their working method in a film studio, this video is an intimate portrait of the collective which purposefully deliberates on how their specific 'thinking business' can offer an alternative support structure for and with each other.

This project was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Barbara Cleveland (Diana Baker Smith, Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley)
Bodies in Time
2016
Single Channel HD Video
13:46 minutes

Choreography and Performance: Angela Goh
Videography: Gotaro Uematsu
Video editing: Kate Blackmore
Sound and original music: Andrew McLellan
Production: Bev Shroot
Hair and make-up: Sophie Roberts

Bodies in Time is the fourth in a series of works exploring the life and legacy of the mythic performance artist Barbara Cleveland. The work is based on a series of 1973 scores by Cleveland, in which she accumulated gestures from the history of performance across both dance and the visual arts.

Working with choreographer and dancer Angela Goh, the artists reanimate Cleveland’s score to consider how performance is transmitted between bodies and across time periods. By further translating the action into video, they construct a dialogue between the body as a volatile form of ‘living archive’ and the mediated status of performance documentation, which foregrounds the multiple levels of authorship at play in the work.

This work was commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of the Contemporary Projects series, which supports new work by living artists at the progressive edge of contemporary practice.

Images by Zan Wimberley and courtesy of the artists.

Diana Baker Smith and Kelly Doley
In Search of Pat Larter
2017
Single Channel HD Video
13:39 minutes

Videography and Video Editing: Kate Blackmore
Sound and Original Music: Andrew McLellan

In Search of Pat Larter engages with the life and legacy of Australian artist Pat Larter. While best known as the ‘muse’ to her husband, Larter was also one of the leading figures in the international mail art movement, and created an extensive number of performances, films and photographs from the 1970s up until her death in 1996. Through a performative video essay, Baker Smith and Doley reactivate Larter’s work in the archive and on the screen. They move between the physical spaces of the Pat Larter Archive at the Art Gallery of NSW and the recording studio, where they read out a series of letters to the late artist and to each other. These gestures are intercut with excerpts from Larter’s films (made in collaboration with Richard Larter) as well as images from her performances and mail art. As Baker Smith and Doley search through Larter’s extensive archive, they contemplate the difficulties associated with revisiting ephemeral art practices and the gender politics of artistic labour that structures art history.

In Search of Pat Larter was first presented at The Public Body 0.2 at Artspace in Sydney.

TEXTS
Call and Response: A Dialogue on Collaboration with/for Pat Larter
Diana Baker Smith and Kelly Doley
Un Magazine 12.2. Spring, 2018.

Porno Parody: In Search of Pat Larter
Diana Baker Smith and Kelly Doley
Runway Magazine, Issue 29, 2016.