“. . . channel the life lived within it.”
An evocative installation by Diana Baker Smith, This Place Where They Dwell is a transformative journey through colour, sound, light, and movement. A homage to modernist Australian artist Margo Lewers, the artwork takes shape within her former home: the Lewers House.
In the historic house with its distinct volume, This Place Where They Dwell is an ode to Lewers’ colourful and abstract oeuvre. An illuminated installation distorts the architecture to disassemble the physicality of the building. A re-remembering of the people who have walked and lived in this hub of creativity. Now a gallery, Baker Smith reveals, “I wanted to explore this movement from the private to the public, this strange thing that takes place when an intimate, domestic space becomes a civic institution such as a museum or gallery, and becomes part of something ‘cultural’.”

Diana Baker Smith: This Place Where They Dwell, 2024, four-channel 4K video, 05.15 minutes. Images courtesy the artists and Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest, Sydney
Penrith Regional Gallery curator Nina Stromqvist reflects on these concepts and how Baker Smith embodied the transformative nature of ‘living modernism’ at Lewers House. “This Place Where They Dwell not only considers the very relatable domestic setting that houses it, but touches on something harder to see,” Stromqvist comments. “Memories that have faded, and stories and voices that once reverberated through the rooms. The very human elements that a home holds in its fabric.”
Floor-to-ceiling sash windows embrace the modernist approach of merging inside and out, offering ample viewpoints of the lush gardens. Covered in coloured vinyl – bright pops of pink, red, yellow and orange – a kaleidoscope of hues stream through. A reference to Lewers’ 1970s plexiglass sculptures. “I imagined performers moving the pieces of plexiglass, refracting the light with their movements, producing different configurations of colour,” says Baker Smith. Following this ideology, a collaborative installation unfolds with choreographer and dancer Lizzie Thomson, who activates the space in response to the nuances of the architecture’s earlier lives. A series of Perspex pieces cut to size in pink, red, yellow, and orange choreograph light in a site-specific performance video work playing in the gallery.
Equally, alongside this, composer and soprano Jane Sheldon produced a soundtrack to embody the building’s multiple lives. “This vocal cord really does hold you as you move through each room, as does the experience of walking with the colour that streams in through the rooms from the colour treated windows,” Stromqvist reflects. “It’s sad and also very beautiful. Like most memories that fade over time.”
Through her research, Baker Smith discovered that Lewers created an artwork with hand-painted silk banners suspended from the ceiling of the Adelaide Festival Centre, including “six dancers in pastel colours and a single flautist casually leaning against a tree.” In 1976, it would have been considered ahead of its time and had caused a deep visceral reaction in the modernist artist. “[This] gave me a structure and a method for how to proceed, using the various archival fragments and memories to develop a performance score for the house,” Baker Smith remembers. “The way that the dancers had responded to Margo’s work was, in a way, a clue, or a sign of how to proceed, how to make my own work in response to the site of the house, and to channel the life lived within it.”
More than just an art installation, more than sound, Perspex, performance, and colourful light streaming and altering architecture, This Place Where They Dwell digs its feet into the ground as a cultural reckoning in Australia that allows for women artists to reclaim their place in art history.
Emma-Kate Wilson is an art and design writer and editor based on Gumbaynggirr Country (Bellingen, New South Wales).
Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest
11 May to 4 August 2024
Sydney