Diana Baker Smith
This Place Where They Dwell
2024
Four channel 4K video
5:15 minutes
This Place Where They Dwell is an expansive moving image work that considers the politics and poetics of domestic space. Filmed inside the former home of modernist artist Margo Lewers, the work engages with the textures, colours, and gestures of her domestic space, honouring its role as both a site of artistic production and a deeply personal domain. Through a rich interplay of performance, sound and light, the work explores how women’s creative legacies are often overshadowed, inviting a renewed engagement with Lewers’ practice and the radical possibilities of the home as a space of making, memory, and transformation.
This Place Where They Dwell was awarded the 2025 Major Acquisitive Gosford Art Prize.
“"Baker Smith’s work brings things we can’t always see, mythologies, power, history, politics, out into the light. This Place Where They Dwell is an exquisite portrait of Margot Lewers, told with care and depth. It brings colour, rhythm and shape to a woman’s legacy and offers to many ways to connect past, present and potentials.” Gina Mobayed
"I’m moved by the generosity of this work’s slow attentive analysis, and continuation of the legacy of an artist forebear. A response to Lewer's formal language and grounded in the domestic space intrinsic to her making, I relish the reminder that our encounters with history, or what we call ‘the archive’, are always a negotiated, embodied experience." Stephanie Nova Milne
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.