Catherine Griffiths

Bio

Catherine Griffiths is an Aotearoa New Zealand designer and artist. Improvisation is critical to her practice which moves between graphic design, self-publishing, and commissioned art installations in public and private spaces, architectural and landscape. Projects include the Wellington Writers Walk, a series of large-scale concrete text sculptures (2002, 2004); the curation and co-organisation of TypeSHED11, Wellington (2009); the compact »typ gr ph c« workshop series; and her ongoing Vowel series including »AEIOU— constructed/projected« (Typojanchi, 2015) and »Light Weight O« (2012, installed 2018). In 2018 Griffiths protested against gender and cultural inequities in design, founded the platform Designers Speak (Up), and curated poster project and touring exhibition, Present Tense : Wāhine Toi Aotearoa. »catherine griffiths : SOLO IN [ ] SPACE« (2019), her first survey show of selected works, exhibited in Shanghai. A post-exhibition book of the same title, a documentation, was published in 2021. She has exhibited in Aotearoa, Chile, France, USA, China and Korea.

Artist Statement
The Keyhole Series is a set of seven French telephone numbers presented large scale as key-hole shaped hand-tufted wool rugs, derived from the hundreds of handwritten and typed tear-off tabs, tiny paper objects, collected over a ten-year period around the streets of Paris in the early 2000s (»Club de Conversation«). The public display of private information is enlarged and abstracted into the keyhole motif, a voyeuristic entry point into that person’s world, the number never wholly revealed. Scale, context and proximity are re-defined in the making of these rugs and through a small artist book, »The Phone Book: Club de Conversation« (2012). The book preserves the fragment, the memento, each telephone number at 1:1 scale, »memento :: motif« (2012).

The pulling apart of the book into ten long strips, »The Phone Book: Club de Conversation« (2012), deconstructed« (2019), makes a single reading of the work. First pinned to the wall in »catherine griffiths : SOLO IN [ ] SPACE« (2019), The Space Gallery, Shanghai, the work book-ends the time before the Covid pandemic, and now, 24 months on, the work is suspended in the natural light of the window space at No Vacancy Gallery. The phone numbers are returned to the street.