Born in India, Helen Ormiston Smith had most of her formal education in the United Kingdom.
She gained her Visual Arts degree from Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland and taught in the public education system there. She came to Canada in 1969 and lived on Vancouver Island, teaching art through clay for over twenty years. In 1993 she moved to Salt Spring Island, where she works and teaches out of her studio.
She also teaches in the Arts in Education Department at the University of Victoria, having graduated with a Master's degree in 1994.

"We have always assumed the permanence of the physical earth. No longer is this one of the ultimate truths. The world, like a human life, is finally acknowledged to be ephemeral. What appears to be eternal is only temporal and it is this ambiguity that is central to my work. I use clay as a medium whose durability is vulnerable and whose nature intensifies and extends my ideas.
The experience of the world is written on the land. Great mountain chains are buckled like spines, monumental landmarks are fractured by a thousand delicate lines, rock faces are scarred and dislocated; strength and fragility exist side by side.
The annals of human experience are recorded on walls, rocks and vessels. These surfaces have born such expression since man began to make note of his surroundings. As such, these ancient archetypes bear witness to the landmarks of human development. I use these forms as icons on which to make my own symbols, my visual commentary on the frail equilibrium and poetry of our world."