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 research 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, making visible the imperceptible forces entangled with extractive histories and colonial occupation. 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.

Over the past 15 years, Baker Smith’s solo and collaborative works have been presented at major museums and institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, 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).

Baker Smith’s research has been supported through a range of competitive grants, residencies, and commissions, including the 2024 Judy Wheeler Commission at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, the ACME Studio Residency in London, and funding from the City of Sydney, Creative Australia, Create NSW, and the Copyright Agency.
 

Selected Publications

1. D. Baker Smith, Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void), 2024, Installation,  performance and single channel 4K video 5:05 minutes. Commissioned by Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts for the 2024 Judy Wheeler Commission.

2. D. Baker Smith, This Place Where They Dwell, 2024, 4 channel 4K video, 5:15 minutes. Commissioned for Penrith Regional Art Gallery, Home of the Lewers Bequest. Subsequently presented at Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney, 2024.

3. D. Baker Smith, A Score for Reconstruction, 2024. Digital print on vinyl, 2 x 20m panels. Commissioned by Newcastle Art Gallery for Laman Street Hoarding Commission, Newcastle.

4. D. Baker Smith, K. Blackmore, 2022, Brief Illuminations Between Interruptions, single channel 4K video, 13.12 minutes. Commissioned for Video Commission by Ngunungulla Regional Art Gallery, Bowral. Subsequently presented at: Gosford Art Prize, Gosford Art Gallery, 2022.

5. D. Baker Smith, 2022, She Speaks in Sculpture, two channel 4K video, 9.35 minutes. Commissioned for She Speaks in Sculpture at UTS Art Gallery, Sydney, 2022. Subsequently presented at Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, Sydney, 2022; Circles of Dialogue, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, 2023; Darebin Art Prize, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Victoria, 2024.
    
6. D. Baker Smith, 2021, The Lost Hour, single channel HD video, 15:50 minutes. First presented at Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion, Artspace Sydney. Subsequently presented at the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, Sydney, 2021; Phillipa Cullen: Know my Name, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart; The Condensery, Somerset Regional Art Gallery, Toogoolawah, 2022.

7. D. Baker Smith, 2021, The One Hour Concert, single channel 4K video, 15:50 minutes. First presented at Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion, Artspace Sydney. Subsequently presented at Phillipa Cullen: Know my Name, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, 2022.

8. D. Baker Smith, V. Tello, 2020, Opening Night (The Order of Arrangements) single channel HD video, 17:15 minutes. Commissioned for Know my Name Conference, National Gallery of Australia, 2020. Subsequently presented at: All About Women, the Sydney Opera House, 2021; quietly, carefully, casually, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, 2022; Photosynthesiers: Women and the Lens, Te Uru Contemporary Gallery, Auckland, 2025

9. D. Baker Smith, 2020 ‘Sculptures that go Home at Night’, The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Anti-Work Politics, ed. David Atwood and Francis Russell, Art+Australia, Melbourne, pp.63-80.

10. D. Baker Smith, K. Blackmore, F. Barrett, K. Doley, 2019, This is a Stained Glass Window, single channel HD video, 13.28 minutes. First presented at Sullivan+Strumpf Gallery, Sydney, 2019. Subsequently presented at Goulburn Regional Gallery, 2020; Penrith Regional Gallery, 2021; Melbourne International Film Festival, 2022; Gosford Art Gallery, NSW, 2022; Pine River Gallery, QLD, 2023; The Condensery | Somerset Regional Art Gallery, 2023; Goldfields Arts Centre, WA, 2023.