potter, was born in England and was employed in a pottery in Burslem, Staffordshire, before coming to Australia with her architect husband. She became a member of the Sydney Society of Arts and Crafts in 1930 and exhibited with the society until 1951. By 1937 she and her husband were living at Eastwood, a suburb of Sydney, where she had a studio equipped with a kiln.
During the 1940s Seccombe became known for her small hand-modelled, brightly painted pottery birds and animals. Her early kookaburras and other birds and animals of the 1920s are marked 'Australia’ and 'S’. The range of Australiana fauna she modelled in the 1930s and 1940s for the Sydney jewellers Prouds Ltd are either initialled 'GS’ or signed 'Grace Seccombe Australia’ on the base.
She also designed plates, dishes and bowls decorated with Aboriginal motifs in the 1930s and 1940s, her designs being hyperbolically stated in 1937 to have captured:
the essential spirit of the native design so completely that her pottery might be the work of a native artist. Mrs Seccombe has reproduced the native designs with remarkable fidelity of line and colour, from paddles and other native implements in the Australian Museum … She has decided to use the various designs only in their proper associations, so that this graceful and lovely, though decidedly primitive, art will remain essentially aboriginal.
Grace Seccombe died on 25 February 1956.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
