Dr Diana Baker Smith

I am an artist and Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales. My artistic practice is collaborative, research driven, and informed by feminist theory. Working at the intersection of performance and moving image, I develop new methodologies for critiquing art history. I am interested in the marginal histories of artists, and their relationship to art institutions and canonical histories. I utilise collaborative approaches, archival research, oral records, fiction and feminist theory. 

I recently completed a series of works focused on the Australian artist, dancer, and choreographer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75), who was influential in Sydney during her lifetime, but has been consigned to two archival boxes held by the National Library, one of which has been misplaced. My recent exhibition at Artspace’s Ideas Platform, Tasks Yet to Be Composed for the Occasion, 2021, uses the remaining box, the memories of her peers, and re-enactment to consider her place within Australian art. It was developed in collaboration with dancer Brooke Stamp, artists Samuel Hodge and Ella Sutherland, and musicians Bree van Reyk and Miles Brown.

I am currently developing a trilogy of video essays about the origin myths of Australian art history in collaboration art historian Verónica Tello. The first work in this series, Opening Night (The Order of Arrangements), 2020, commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia, and screened at the Sydney Opera House in 2021, analyses how the origin stories of a national museum are reproduced through archives, art history and museum work.

I am also a founding member of the art collective Barbara Cleveland (formed in 2007 with Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley). Our works are held in the collections of Artbank, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Monash University Museum of Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the Art Gallery of NSW. In 2020 Barbara Cleveland’s survey exhibition, Thinking Business launched at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, and will tour nationally with Museums & Galleries NSW in 2021.