Diana Baker Smith
A Score for Reconstruction
2024
Newcastle Art Gallery
Digital print on vinyl, 2 x 20m panels

A Score for Reconstruction is a text-based public artwork commissioned by Newcastle Art Gallery for its major expansion. Installed along a temporary hoarding on Laman Street, the work invites audiences to consider their relationship to the rhythms of the city and its ongoing cycles of change, renewal, and development.

Drawing on geological and colonial histories, specifically the ground-remediation works required to stabilise the site’s former coal mines, Baker Smith created a series of movement prompts using the visual language of mining maps and geological strata. These movement prompts, centred on ideas of loss, creep, drift, and flow, transform the invisible shifts beneath our feet into embodied gestures.

The bold, wave-like text layout mimics cross-sections of sediment and rock layers, while the colour palette references mapping conventions used in geological surveys. In recontextualising these diagrams through performance, the work brings to the surface the slow, imperceptible processes that shape the land beneath us.

A Score for Reconstruction asks how we might attune to layered histories of place, including those shaped by extraction and colonial occupation, through the moving body. By following the score, audiences are invited into a mode of sensory attention: one that foregrounds the instability of ground, memory, and historical narrative itself.

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Commissioned by Newcastle Art Gallery for the Laman Street Hoarding Commission

Diana Baker Smith, A Score for Reconstruction, 2024. Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery. Photo: Matthew Carbone.