Digital Art

This Place Where They Dwell is an expansive moving image work that considers the politics and poetics of domestic space. Filmed inside the former home of modernist artist Margo Lewers, the work explores how women’s creative legacies are often overshadowed, inviting a renewed engagement with Lewers’ practice and the radical possibilities of the home as a space of making, memory and transformation.

Image credit: Diana Baker Smith, This Place Where They Dwell, 2024. Photo: Lucy Parakhina.

Thunderhead is a single piece of footage captured by Havelock Stevens after “going the wrong way, then getting on the right track” while driving along Highway 54 in Texas. It shows the meteorological spectacle of a supercell, anchored just off the horizon across an outstretched plain, a low-lying mountain range visible in the distance. The work captures the unpredictable and extraordinary forms that manifest in the earth’s atmosphere and reminds us of the creeping uncertainty of weather patterns.

MGM 2019 presents a new perspective on the flower still life genre. Devoid of real flowers, the sculptural forms are composed of clips appropriated from YouTube. A model of a Bentley spinning, the MGM lion roaring and the wing of a bird flapping were copied and layered to create a virtual floral assemblage. The forms that echo leafy foliage and coiled petals disintegrate and disperse into plumes of colour, suggesting the dynamic flourishes of a traditional floral arrangement, but also the alchemy of wet paint being smeared and dripping on a canvas. 

In the video installation, a menagerie of chickens moves through a clearing in a bleak grey forest, making digitally generated sounds instead of their usual squawking. Drawing us into a scenario where the viewer can imagine these strange birds are the only species left alive on earth, the work offers a glimpse into what life might be like after the end of human civilisation; a future world plagued by mass extinction and environmental catastrophe but inhabited by new organic–technological hybrids. 

Image credit: Hayden Fowler, New World Order, 2013, (production still xiii)