Diana Baker Smith
She Speaks in Sculpture
2022
Two channel 4K video
9:35 minutes
She Speaks in Sculpture is a two-channel moving image work commissioned by UTS Art Gallery that reanimates the fractured history of Growth Forms (1959), a major public sculpture by Australian-American artist Margel Hinder.
Originally commissioned for Sydney’s Western Assurance Building, Growth Forms was subjected to decades of relocation, damage, and near-destruction—cut into pieces, saved from a scrapyard, welded back together by Hinder herself, and ultimately relocated across various institutional settings. Drawing from archival research, conservation footage, and Hinder’s own writings, Diana Baker Smith traces the sculpture’s precarious trajectory as a way of reflecting on the fragility of public memory and the gendered erasures embedded in the history of modernism.
At the centre of the work is a speculative encounter: a dancer, in dialogue with the sculpture, animates its forms through movement, invoking Hinder’s early experiments with motion and light. Sound, performance, and archival image are layered to create a portrait of a work—and a woman—that has survived through transformation.
She Speaks in Sculpture continues Baker Smith’s commitment to working with overlooked or obscured histories, engaging with the material traces of art, architecture, and memory to consider how the past might be re-performed in the present.
“Rather than intervene with the archive, She Speaks in Sculpture inhabits a productive space beside it. This position is multidirectional, with both the archive and the work informing each other.”
— Amelia Wallin, Memo Review, 2022
Work Credits
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
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This project was commissioned by UTS Art Gallery and was 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.