Diana Baker Smith’s current exhibition, She Speaks in Sculpture, raises questions about archives and legacies, and the absences that populate them. Who can speak for whom and with what materials? When a work enters the public realm, whose responsibility is it to maintain it? The exhibition takes place within UTS Gallery, a university exhibition space with a collection of 850 artworks. It is one such work in the collection that She Speaks in Sculpture is centred around: Growth Forms, a piece of public art by celebrated Australian-American artist Margel Hinder (1906–1995). More specifically, Baker Smith turns her attention to the work’s displacement and movement over six decades. Transplanted across various sites as a result of building demolitions and changing tastes, Growth Forms has been moved at least four times since it was first installed in 1959 including, at one stage, being cut for distribution as scrap metal. It has since been reassembled and as of this year is on permanent display in the UTS tower. This prominent position is still a compromise, as UTS curator Stella Rosa McDonald admits, as it stands with one side against a wall. Hinder’s intention was that the viewer could circumnavigate the column-like structure to experience the interplay of light and pattern through its form.
Amelia Wallin is a curator and writer, with a focus on care, feminisms and alternate curatorial frameworks and models for instituting. From 2019 to 2022 she was the Director of West Space, and in 2022 she joined La Trobe Art Institute as Curator.
