The Cube: Diana Baker Smith

Diana Baker Smith’s exhibition Trace a Piece of Water follows the movement and rhythms of two port cities: Cobh Harbour in Ireland and Sydney Harbour in Australia. Filmed across the water and along the shorelines, the work attends to the shifting surfaces and rhythms of the two harbours, drawing attention to the colonial histories that connect these sites. 

Trace a Piece of Water takes its title from William Bradley, First Lieutenant aboard HMS Sirius, the flagship of the First Fleet. In a journal entry from 1789, he wrote that Governor Phillip had gone to “trace a piece of water”, hoping to find a river running between Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay. The phrase, repeated throughout Bradley’s record of the early colony, underscores the central role of water within the British Empire, with navigable waters forming a critical link between the Imperial centre and its ever-expanding peripheries.

Using Bradley’s writing as an instruction, Trace a Piece of Water brings attention to water as both a surface and a medium through which colonial power operated. Filmed on Super 8 while walking along the shorelines of Sydney and Cork Harbours, the work follows a simple score: one walk, one roll of film, its duration determined by the length of the reel. The score was repeated along Sydney Harbour during a year-long residency at Vaucluse House, and Cork Harbour during a residency at Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh. The work considers these two key ports within Britain’s maritime empire, their harbours enabling the movement of people, labour and capital on which its expansion depended. Cork has a particular relationship to Sydney, as a port through which generations of Irish convicts and immigrants left for Australia, including the artist’s own ancestors.

Across two channels, footage from the two harbours repeats and falls in and out of sync, allowing their surfaces to converge and separate. The material interruptions of Super 8 become part of this shifting rhythm, bringing the distant waterways into relation.