Helen Dorothy Grey-Smith was a textile artist, designer and painter. She was born in India and spent most of her life in Western Australia. Between 1936-1939 she studied at the London School of Interior Design. At the commencement of World War II she married Guy Grey-Smith and spent the war years working in the drawing office of an aircraft factory.
After the war, when her husband had recuperated from tuberculosis contracted in a prisoner-of-war camp, they returned to Western Australia, arriving in 1949. Here there were opportunities for an interior designer particularly if she could produce the specialist materials required. Grey-Smith returned to Europe for the 1953-1954 academic year and studied textile design at The Hammersmith School of Art under John Drummond. He encouraged her to develop textile printing as a viable business. From 1954 to 1967 in Western Australia she designed six new furnishing fabrics and six dress fabrics per year. Six months were spent developing the designs, which were exhibited, usually with Guy’s paintings, and the remaining months of each year were spent printing the orders taken. Grey-Smith had twelve exhibitions with her husband at Newspaper House Gallery and The Skinner Galleries in Perth, Darlington Hall, Darlington and Farmers Blaxland Gallery, Sydney. Patrick Hutchings writing in the Westerly in 1962 described her designs as “characterized by an elegant severity and restraint”. He found “[h]er dress and furnishing fabrics are … eminently practical.”
As there was no industry to design for, it was just as well that Grey-Smith, in common with many others at this time, felt the 'living hand-made crafts’ to be very important. She believed that machine-made goods had no individuality; that human quality was totally non-existent in them; and that a designer should print her own work, so that the design and the craft did not become divorced one from another. Whilst she believed the warmth and idiosyncrasy of hand-made goods should not be lost, nor did she believe they should be either 'precious’ or 'arty-crafty’. She endeavoured to make sure her work was at least as well made as machine goods. Her subjects were drawn from experiences in Australia, India and Southeast Asia.
Grey-Smith always maintained that drawing was the backbone of her work and a basis for her designs. When she moved onto silk screens, which she developed as her m_tier, Grey-Smith continued to use lino-cuts to take the designs beyond the drawing stage. Many of her designs reflect this process-oriented approach. The repeat pattern of an Indian dancer in his carved niche – printed in a subtle grey-blue on a cream twill – is an enlarged block print design with uncomplicated registration. The overall effect of the repeats is not unlike the massed sculptures on the Indian temples which no doubt inspired the design. Her crusader pattern of 1960 develops the Indian dancer into a more complex three-figure design whilst still using the simple registration.
Like many new settlers to Western Australia, Grey-Smith found the unusual flora of the state fascinating. The acid yellow flowers of the swamp banksia are particularly eye catching and a furnishing fabric for Bishops House in Perth appears to have been developed from this. The simplified two-colour print accurately caught the essence of the plant.
The primitive screens available for use at this time meant it was impossible to get much detail into the designs. Grey-Smith viewed this as a challenge, a restriction that forced her to think broadly and consider the overall effect. This attitude stood her in good stead when she undertook large commissions. Her first commission, and arguably her most successful fabric, was five hundred yards for the University of Western Australia Staff House. The design of galloping horses incorporated subtle colour ways, giving depth to the clever impression of a group of swiftly moving horses, their manes flowing in the wind.
Other large commissions followed. One thousand yards of black and gold material incorporating the Perth City Council crest printed for the new Council Chambers in 1965 was followed by six hundred yards for the Reserve Bank in Canberra expressly requested by its Governer of the time, H.C. “Nugget” Coombs.
The strain of the silkscreen process, which she used, caused injury forcing her to give up and she turned to painting and collage. Henceforth her mediums included printing on paper, collage, ink drawing and acrylic paint. The couple visited Sri Lanka in 1963, Bali in 1967, worked in Cambodia in 1971-72 and Grey-Smith went to India in 1985. Her exhibition in 1992 provoked critic David Bromfield to write, “[a]t Delaney Galleries, Helen Grey-Smith has an entertaining show of painted collages of forest scenes. Her small studies are often delicate with hazy harmonies. The large works are more robust. A series of vertical surfaces derived from tree trunks are spaced out by deep purplish stripes.”
- Writers:
- Dr Dorothy Erickson
- Date written:
- 2010
- Last updated:
- 2011
