Diana Baker Smith
This Place Where They Dwell
2024
Four channel 4K video
5:15 minutes
This Place Where They Dwell is a site-specific performance, installation, and video work commissioned by Penrith Regional Gallery. Created within the former home of Margo and Gerald Lewers—now a regional gallery established through the Lewers Bequest—the work considers the house as both a domestic interior and a cultural archive.
Through gestures of performance, sound, and image, Diana Baker Smith explores how memory, gender, and institutional narratives are shaped and unsettled within architectural space. The house becomes a living archive: a site of resonance where past and present are entangled through rhythm, repetition, and absence. Working closely with archival materials—letters, artworks, plans—Baker Smith developed a score for performance that responds to the textures and traces of Margo Lewers’ life in the home.
Developed in collaboration with dancer Lizzie Thomson and composer Jane Sheldon, the work dwells on the overlooked minutiae of a female artist’s domestic life, while quietly interrogating how cultural institutions preserve, frame, and legitimise historical memory. By positioning the home as a site of both personal and institutional transformation, This Place Where They Dwell brings into view the layered entanglements of artistic canons, feminist histories, and settler-colonial legacies.
“Baker Smith dwells on the minutiae of the domestic life of a female artist from yesteryear, subtly but unambiguously critiquing the project of artistic canons and settler-colonialism.”
— Veronica Tello, Frieze, 2024
Work Credits
Choreographer and Performer: Lizzie Thomson
Composer and Soprano: Jane Sheldon
Cinematographer: Nisa East
Costume Designer: Leah Giblin
Sound Mix: Bob Scott
Colourist: Justin Tran
Photographer: Lucy Parakhina
Edit Assistant: Eloise Martin-Jones
Production Assistant: Amy Prcevich
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This Place Where They Dwell 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.