About
Diana Baker Smith is an Australian artist whose work transforms historical narratives through feminist interventions. Her work reactivates archival and primary sources to open new ways of thinking about Australian history. Combining performance, moving image, sound, and dance, her projects often unfold through interdisciplinary collaborations with artists, dancers, and composers. Baker Smith’s practice is grounded in a commitment to unsettling dominant historical narratives—particularly those shaped by settler-colonial institutions—by activating embodied and affective responses to the archive. Positioning herself as an artist-as-historian or artist-as-archivist, she engages with histories that are fragmented, ephemeral, or obscured, tracing their movement through bodies, memory, and place.
Her work has been presented at major museums and institutions including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the Hayward Gallery (London), and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul). Recent projects include A Score for Reconstruction (2024, Newcastle Art Gallery), a bold set of movement prompts that reimagine the city’s mining foundations and geological shifts as embodied actions, making visible the imperceptible movements entangled with extractive histories and colonial occupation. In This Place Where They Dwell (2024, Penrith Regional Gallery), she extends this engagement with embodied memory by reimagining the modernist home of Margo Lewers as both a domestic space and an archive, subtly interrogating how artistic canons and colonial legacies are shaped, maintained, and unsettled through the materials and memories of the home. Most recently, in Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void) (2024, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts), she turned her attention to the layered colonial history of PICA’s building—originally constructed as a public school—using a graphic score, choreography, and archival research to explore how institutional architectures hold and shape historical consciousness.
She is currently developing a new body of work that deepens her inquiry into the legacies of settler colonialism through a more personal and embodied engagement with history. Drawing on her own familial archive, the project traces the entangled colonial histories of Ireland and Australia, using water as both subject and method to explore how performance and moving image might unsettle dominant historical narratives.
Baker Smith is a founding member of the artist collective Barbara Cleveland, whose collaborative practice explores the intersections of performance, history, and feminist politics. The collective’s work has been presented in major exhibitions including Know My Name (National Gallery of Australia, 2021), Australia: Antipodean Stories (Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 2020), the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016). Barbara Cleveland’s work is held in public collections including Artbank, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and Monash University Museum of Art.
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Diana Baker Smith lives and works on Gadigal land. She acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the Traditional Custodians of this land, and pays respect to Elders past and present. As an artist working on unceded Aboriginal land, she recognises the responsibilities of practicing within ongoing structures of colonial occupation and is committed to challenging these histories through her work.
Contact
mail@dianabakersmith.com
Diana Baker Smith and Kate Blackmore, Brief Illuminations Between Interruptions, 2022, Single channel 4K video, 13:12 minutes. Photo: Anna Hay