When I visit artist Diana Baker Smith’s bold and vibrant new commission, This Place Where They Dwell (2024) at Lewers House (now Penrith Regional Gallery), I immediately sense we are in that wave in the mind. Real and imagined conversations with the archive—both tangible and intangible—float to the surface. I am drawn to how Diana intricately weaves her own archival research with embodied, vibrant collaborations.¹ These communions span living and non-living artists, and have built a sophisticated oeuvre of site-specific commissions, including recent works at the Perth Centre for Contemporary Art (PICA), Newcastle Art Gallery, and UTS Gallery Sydney. Across these sites, Diana becomes submerged in the slippery fictions of what might be called ‘art history’ but could also be thought of as ‘art living’. Hers is not a quiet, finished, closed-book art history, but a porous search for presence. She locates this presence in the archives, interrogating the politics and echoes in the histories of art makers, particularly women artists, who have been marginalised. Her practice, poised at the intersection of performance and moving image, critically re-examines and reimagines these feminist historical narratives. Diana is an artist who resides in the rhythms of the wave in the mind.

For This Place Where They Dwell, Diana draws on the life of Margo Lewers, a pivotal force in Australian abstract art. Lewers championed the abstract expressionist movement during the heated debates of the 1950s and 1960s, when abstraction clashed with representational art. Her modernist approach was bold and broad-ranging, characterised by an interdisciplinary free flow between mediums, including painting, collage, textiles, sculpture, mosaic, pottery and furniture design. In Diana’s research for the commission, she accumulated an understanding of Margo through ephemera—letters, artworks, plans—and returned to these fragments, almost like clues, which eventually became the source of the performance score for This Place Where They Dwell. Diana describes the score as a compendium of gestures: fragments of letters written by Margo, moments related to her work, and words about the Lewers home.

One phrase Diana found in the archive, ‘Situations for long views’, resonated with her when considering the site. Margo originally wrote this phrase in a letter about her garden, describing the vistas she intended to be viewable from her home. When you walk into Margo’s former home, you enter a colonial building on the unceded lands of the Dharug and Gandangara peoples. Diana shares,

I started thinking about the way that Margo and many others had physically moved through her house at Emu Plains and how, over time, we become so familiar with the domestic spaces we inhabit. Now, anyone can walk through that house but it’s impossible not to imagine Margo’s familiarity with it; you walk past her bathroom, the front step is worn down by her feet.

Diana’s approach to this site-specific commission exemplifies a deep engagement with the domestic space as an archive. In her reflection on the Lewers home, she draws on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘rhythmanalysis’, applying it to the intimate scale of a domestic setting.² Diana’s installation at Lewers House utilises four rooms, each transformed into a space of affective resonance. The house, with its layers of memory and presence, becomes a living archive, where the rhythms of past and present coexist.

During the artist talk with curator Nina Stromqvist, Diana mentions Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘archive fever’ in relation to this commission. His words attest to the home as an archive when he writes,

It is … in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take form. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public. It is what is happening, right here, when a house … becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.³

Nina worked closely with Diana in developing this site-specific commission. She says,

We approached Diana when she had just opened her exhibition She Speaks in Sculpture at UTS Galleries in 2022. The work piqued our interest as it delved into the life and work of American/Australian modernist artist Margel Hinder, specifically her modernist sculpture Growth Forms, 1958-59. We hold a number of Hinder's works in our collection, and she was a dear friend and fellow artist of Margo Lewers, the former inhabitant of what is now Penrith Regional Gallery. We invited Diana to the Gallery to see some of the Hinder works with the view to create a new work—perhaps around the friendship and connection with the Lewers family, and how the Emu Plains property was a hub for this important modernist movement in Australia at the time.

It didn’t take long for Diana to feel the presence of Margo Lewers, which is everywhere here—through the artist garden, floor mosaics, architecture, and of course, Margo’s former home, now known as Lewers House. Margo lived there with her family and then alone for almost three decades of her life. It was wonderful to spend time in the collection and archive with an artist like Diana, who has such sensitivity to the way Australian women artists were overlooked in the arts and is so motivated to reclaim their place in art history.

She goes on say, ‘This Place Where They Dwell not only considers the very relatable domestic setting that houses it but touches on something harder to see. Memories that have faded, and stories and voices that once reverberated through the rooms. The very human elements that a home holds in its fabric.’ 

Lewers House is divided into four modest rooms, each running off a shared short hallway. In each of the four rooms Diana thinks in fours—a kind of quad-centric logic—bringing in four screens, four notes in the soundscape and four colours. Each of these elements is chosen with sensitivity, often in response to the findings in the archive. Here, I am drawn to another phrase from Diana’s score: ‘Warm spots, Warmer, Warmest’. This is lifted from the sign-off of a letter Margo wrote and the words feel infused with affection.

Diana discovered important details about Margo’s work by being in conversation with two of Margo’s peers, curator Silver Harris and dancer Cheryl Stock, both of whom were involved in Margo’s final exhibition commissioned by the Adelaide Festival Centre in 1976. Her installation included hand-painted fabrics acting as a kind of installation for a live performance from local dancers. This new direction in Margo’s work, performed right at the end of her career, became an offering for Diana to think through performance, dance and colour in Lewers House. Almost like continuing an unfinished conversation.

It is in the ‘warm spots’ of the four rooms where we find the living communions and the collaborators with whom Diana worked so closely. Diana tells me how she and the choreographer and performer Lizzie Thomson sensed the space together, over time building the shared score, which forms the basis of the performance. She tells me how they filmed in the space, chasing the sun between rooms, breathing colour and life back into the rooms. In the video works, hung in each room, Lizzie is seen moving with assurance, capturing the light on Perspex screens, hunting for a live composition. There is a ghostly beauty to her performance—focused attention, gentle composure. In the spirit of communing with women in the wave of the mind, composer and soprano singer Jane Sheldon was invited by Diana to compose the soundscape for the work. She performs four notes, one for each room, and together they form a chord harmonising and lingering in the hallway. When I am visiting for the artist talk, Jane is performing in the space, singing a fifth note. She stands in the hallway, her back to us, framed by the federation-style doorway with its coloured glass panels. Her voice echoes out to us all and we are silenced in her powerful grasp. The fifth note brings the walls to life. The house, as Diana had intended, is an archive on fire. 

There is a feminist sensitivity with which Diana approaches the history of women artists, one that is evident in her engagement with Margo Lewers’s legacy, as well as in Diana’s broader artistic commitment to reclaiming the place of women in art history. Through sound, colour and performance, This Place Where They Dwell becomes a highly affective resonance in four-by-four walls, a meditation on presence and absence. It is a powerful reminder that the archive is not a static repository of the past, but a living entity, capable of generating new meanings and resonances in the hands of an artist such as Diana Baker Smith—one highly attuned to its potential.