Diana Baker Smith is an artist and researcher whose practice explores how history is constructed, remembered, and embodied. Working at the intersection of performance and moving image, she engages archival materials to unsettle dominant narratives—particularly those shaped by settler-colonial institutions such as museums, galleries, and universities.
Her practice is grounded in feminist methodologies and collaborative processes, activating embodied and affective responses to historical materials. Positioning herself as an artist-as-historian or artist-as-archivist, Baker Smith engages with sites, archives, and institutional histories to reimagine what is remembered, forgotten, or deliberately obscured. Her work often focuses on histories that are fractured, ephemeral, or incomplete—treating these ruptures as openings through which to rethink the past.
In recent years, she has developed a distinctive solo practice following a long collaborative career with the artist collective Barbara Cleveland. Recent solo exhibitions and commissions include This Place Where They Dwell (2024, Penrith Regional Gallery), a four-channel video installation that reimagines the modernist home of Margo Lewers as both a domestic space and an archive; Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void) (2024, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts), a site-specific work combining a graphic score, choreography, and video to explore how institutional architectures hold and shape historical consciousness; and A Score for Reconstruction (2024, Newcastle Art Gallery), a series of movement prompts that reimagine the city’s mining foundations and geological shifts as embodied actions. She is currently developing a new body of work that draws on her familial archive to trace the entangled colonial histories of Ireland and Australia, using water as both subject and method.
Baker Smith’s solo and collaborative works have 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). Her work has also featured in significant exhibitions such as Know My Name: Australian Women Artists (National Gallery of Australia, 2021), Australia: Antipodean Stories (Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 2020), Divided Worlds, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (2018), and The Future is Already Here – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed, 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016).
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Diana Baker Smith lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney. She acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the Traditional Custodians of this land and pays respect to Elders past and present. Her practice recognises the responsibilities of working on unceded Aboriginal land and seeks to critically engage with the ongoing legacies of colonial occupation.
Contact
mail@dianabakersmith.com