EMU PLAINS.- Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of The Lewers Bequest, launched a major new commission, inspired by the life and legacy of acclaimed 20th Century Modernist artist Margo Lewers (1908 – 1978).

Sydney artist Diana Baker Smith works at the intersection of performance and moving image, her artistic practice examining the politics of art history through methods of archival research, collaboration, embodiment, and fiction.

In her new commission, This Place Where They Dwell, she engages with the personality enshrined within the historied buildings and heritage gardens of Penrith Regional Gallery, re-animating the spirit of one of the most important Australian artists of the post-war period, who once called the gallery site home.

A four-channel video installation, presented in the Gallery’s historic Lewers House, This Place Where They Dwell invites audiences to experience the once private and intimate space where Lewers lived, made art, raised children, mourned her husband, and died; before her home was bequeathed as a public arts institution, and the foundational heart of the Penrith Regional gallery site.

Informed by archival correspondence, and conversations with renowned Australian dancer and choreographer, Cheryl Stock – who performed in a dance work responding to Lewers’ final installation in 1976 – Baker Smith’s striking moving image work pays homage to Lewers’ boldly experimental spirit, through performance, dance, sound and film.

Baker Smith examines Lewers’ home as if it were an artwork or cultural object in an archive, a repository for the traces of lived experience that occurred over the three decades that the artist called Emu Plains home. – Curator, Nina Stromqvist

Margo Lewers was one of Australia’s most outstanding abstract artists, and a pioneer of the abstract expressionist movement during the 1950s and 1960s; a time when fierce battles raged between abstract and representational art. Emblematic of the modernist spirit, her experimental interdisciplinary practice spanned a broad range of media, from painting to collage, textiles, sculpture, mosaic, pottery and furniture design.

In researching Lewers’ legacy, Diana Baker Smith was particularly drawn to archival correspondence relating to Lewers’ final exhibition as part of the Adelaide Festival 1976 – a series of hand painted silk banners hung from the ceiling of the grand foyer of the Adelaide Festival Centre, creating a three-dimensional sculptural environment, interacting with the ambient light.

Intrigued by records of Lewers’ intense emotional response to a live performance activation of her installation by American choreographer, Marilyn Wood (1929 – 2016), Baker Smith engaged in a series of conversations with dancer and choreographer, Cheryl Stock, who had collaborated with Wood on the creation and performance of the work.

Informed by Stock’s recollections of how Wood had worked to create a site-specific performance in Adelaide almost 50 years ago, Baker Smith made numerous visits to Lewers House with dancer and choreographer Lizzie Thomson, methodically noting the sounds, smells, rhythms and architecture of the setting, in preparation for their own site-responsive performance.

Featuring a newly commissioned score, written and performed by acclaimed Australian–American composer and soprano Jane Sheldon, This Place Where They Dwell follows Thomson moving through Lewers’ home, capturing an improvised choreography between movement, colour, space, and light.

The video was filmed by award-winning cinematographer Nisa East, with costumes by Leah Giblin.

“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.” – Diana Baker Smith