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.