Creatives selected for inaugural Vaucluse House Creative and Cultural Residency
Museums of History NSW is pleased to announce the four creatives who will be participating in the inaugural Vaucluse House Creative and Cultural Residency program.
The residency offers time, space, connection and inspiration in a stunning harbourside environment on Birrabirragal and Gadigal Country. Designed to support creative practice, it seeks to foster meaningful connections between artists, place and community.
Open to NSW-based creatives at any stage of their career, the residency encourages proposals that engage with the site, its surrounding landscape and the work of Museums of History NSW.
2025 Creatives
Diana Baker Smith
Creative practice: Visual arts
I’m grateful for the time and dedicated studio space this residency provides to focus on two new projects that extend my interest in how histories are embodied, remembered, and spatialised through architecture and built environments. To work from a site like Vaucluse House, situated on the edge of Sydney Harbour and bound up with colonial legacies, offers an important context for this ongoing research.
Diana Baker Smith is an artist based on Gadigal land in Sydney. Her practice is grounded in feminist methodologies and collaborative processes, activating embodied and affective responses to historical materials through performance and moving image. Positioning herself as an artist-as-historian, Baker Smith engages with sites, archives, and institutional histories to reimagine what is remembered, forgotten or deliberately obscured.
Henrietta Cheshire
Creative practice: Textiles
I’m genuinely thrilled to be starting my residency at Vaucluse House. As any artist knows, having a space that’s entirely your own where you can spread out, experiment and focus solely on your work is a real gift. I’m deeply grateful to Museums of History NSW for this opportunity. I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the history of the house, developing new ideas and meeting the many wonderful people who cross its path.
Henrietta Cheshire is a Sydney-based textile artist working on Gayamaygal land on the Northern Beaches. Her practice explores how textiles can hold memory, emotion and history, particularly the overlooked stories of women’s labour and domestic life. Drawing on archival research and traditional hand embroidery techniques, her work reinterprets everyday objects as vessels of lived experience, giving voice to the unseen and the unrecorded.
Lucie Stevens
Creative practice: Writing
The residency is going to be life changing for me, so I am deeply grateful for the support.
Lucie Stevens is a children’s writer who grew up in a semi-rural area of Dharug Country, north-west of Sydney. After working in nonfiction publishing houses and for the Australian Society of Authors for many years, she moved to Berlin, where she helped make education outreach programs for the UK and European Space Agencies. During this period, Stevens was also Deputy Editor of Visual Verse, a monthly online anthology of art and words.
Philip Samartzis
Creative practice: Sound/research
I’m thrilled to join the inaugural Creative and Cultural Residency at Vaucluse House, where I’ll explore Sydney’s layered histories and harbourside soundscapes through field recording, photography, and listening.
Philip Samartzis is a sound artist, researcher and curator working on Gadigal Country. His practice investigates the social and environmental conditions of remote regions and marginalised communities. Working across Antarctica and sub-Antarctica, the Swiss and Australian Alps, and the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia, he uses advanced audio technologies to register environmental change in some of the world’s most fragile and dynamic ecosystems.
Published on
Stories from Vaucluse House
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Convict Sydney
Harbourside Gothic: The convict origins of Vaucluse House
Its architectural style is not all that is gothic about Vaucluse House. Discover the dark history of the house’s first owner, Henry Browne Hayes
The coolest room in the house
What practical techniques can we learn from historical building design to minimise heat and energy consumption in our homes today?
The leprechaun in the garden
Most of us have some childhood memory – or something half-imagined, half-remembered – of a garden of seemingly infinite adventure, far from the reasonable world of grown-up things
Putting Wentworth to rest
Edward Champion describes the massive public funeral of William Charles Wentworth and explains why Sydney-siders mourned in such unprecedented scale