Geometry is everywhere we look in Nature. Spirals, meanders, explosions, packing, and branching are the patterns it takes in determining the shape of our world.   Counter to the old adage that there is no such thing as a straight line or circle in nature, the evidence of our eyes and of our minds contradicts this notion. We find straight lines in crystals, rocks, and the thin strains of a spider’s web. Circles in ripples of water, the planets above us, and the rings of a fallen tree. They are there for the finding, and scientists and mathematicians have investigated those patterns to reveal the mysteries of existence.

For five decades, Mark Grey-Smith has been making drawings and sculptures that embody his love of nature, science, mathematics, and the ways of knowing our world that is implicit in an understanding of the natural world. He has created a body of works that speak eloquently of the underlying geometry that informs us and teases us with hints of mysteries yet to be revealed.

From his early studies at Chelsea School of Art in the 1970s, working with such luminaries as Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Hall, he was inspired to create work that replicated the geometry of nature. On his return to Perth, he co-foundered PRAXIS. This artist-run space energised a younger generation of artists by challenging them to make art relevant to this place while intently aware of international concerns. It was an ambition at the core of his own practice, which he honed in Perth before departing for Canberra and further study at the Australian National University. Later he taught at that institution for a decade before returning to Perth and eventually settling in Pemberton and then Busselton.

In the 1990s, he combined the spare elegance of his welded steel sculptures with terrazzo, concrete, and plaster to produce a sophisticated group of works that seem to swell and expand into the containing air around them. They are large yet buoyant and activated into life by our movement around their robust forms. Works such as Germ Type 2 mimic cellular growth and atomic structure. In contrast, later works made in the early 2000s like Centrefold use the elegant circularity of its geometry as a metaphor for the essence of existence. It sits on Cottesloe Beach, combining land, sky, and sea in another act of unification.

His recent works echo these earlier explorations of “… matter in a dance with space”.

This dance with space is fundamental to his practice. He has translated his own language of geometry into sculptures that have a vital relationship with the space surrounding them. They occupy and activate this emptiness into a contained whole. “I see the works as drawing in space,” he explains. “They are three-dimensional lines and planes playing with positive and negative space with many edges and profiles.”  As we move around them, these relationships are exposed and reinforced.

The process of making invariably begins with drawing, which is another dance with space. Pencil on paper carving out the geometry of a hillside, a landscape extending to the horizon, or the structure of a rock.  Then, the forms in these drawings made in the Pilbara over the last decade and on a recent trip to Marble Bar are freed from the containing rectangle of the page and released into the surrounding space in forms made from paper clay steel, and plaster. 

The works from his earlier Organelle and Cuboid series embody the energy of complex convolutions contained within a harmonising, stabilising square. They writhe with elegant grace in an arabesque or articulate a linear pathway traversed with care to put pressure on each boundary and at every intersection.  Whether white or coloured, they expand into the surrounding void, possessing or sharing. Their expanding influence capturing or retreating, becoming positive or negative as we move around them in our own dance with space.

An imperative of his recent body of works was his need to respond to the crisis of COVID. “This work is an outcome of a desire to work freely, fast and small,” he says, and also to encapsulate the emotional intensity of this experience on all our lives. The five COVID20 works “… are meant as expressions of human emotion. On hearing about the outbreak out of a news virus in China, I became very worried. Both for myself and for humanity.” Each sculpture seems like a cry or contortion, the colour emphasising the inference of human anguish. Curling in on itself, unfurling or imploding his geometric language articulates his concerns and frustrations. 

Modest in size, but not in scale. “These sculptures are both works in their own right and models for large versions,” he insists. Size is not the same as scale, and their expansiveness is palpable in their presence. How wonderful it would be to wander into their dense architecture and look through their network of interactions to the expanding space beyond. How confronting to be dwarfed by their contorted cry and swept up in their elaborate swirling arabesques. Yet in their modesty is also great beauty and solace.  They contain vastness within them.

Mark Grey-Smith is a significant artist whose new works stand as a record of our time. In this COVID period of human existence, now stretching into its third year, the world as we know it has morphed and changed as we battle with isolation and a sense of disconnectedness. In this small group of works, he reflects the  impact of those anxieties in their rhythms, patterns, and structures. In the process he provides us with a series of beautiful objects that offer a sense of calm and hope.