In her mid‑career, artist-painter Sally Griffin emerges not just as a chronicler of stories but as an interpreter of lived experience. Her work embodies what she calls new realism, a seamless meld of historical resonance, personal memory, and creative imagination. The result is art that pulses with significance: familiar, intimate, yet mysteriously expansive.
Griffin’s canvases often have a personal narrative that transport us from domestic interiors to public memory. Whether evoking a campaign for the eight hour day or a sunlit living room through pauses of stillness, her compositions - fragmentary yet integrated - read like emotionally charged montages from history and myth . Her non‑traditional realism gracefully resists overt literalism: what may begin as what I see transforms into what I understand - symbolic gestures towards life’s layered landscape - memory, family, public life and politics.
Griffin’s public artworks stand as cultural landmarks. The Women’s Suffrage Memorial Mural in New Lynn reveals her narrative ambition, honoring Kate Sheppard and other suffragists, in a bold, and modernist form. This works reveal her creative expression as a vehicle for communal memory, scaled up to speak to civic identity, forging links between past and present New Zealand.
Griffin has done a lot of photography in her time which has recorded images ‘for memory - and for later’. It has helped infuse her painterly eye with intimacy, empathy, and historical bearing. Her photographic images reflect a discipline of observation and personal engagement, carrying over into the painterly compositions she produces.
This year, Griffin’s early photographs of Tony Fomison are in a biography Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist by Mark Forman, published by the Auckland University Press - and recent photos taken for the author are included in the recent biography My Own Sort of Heaven: A life of Rosalie Gascoigne by Nicola Francis, published by ANU Press.
As a very young child, Sally was covering the long laminated bar at home, which acted as a room divider between kitchen and lounge, with drawings. Sometimes they were ajaxed off, sometimes they survived a few days, and on this surface, she had her first lessons in drawing.
After finishing high school in Melbourne, Griffin went to the Melbourne State College in the city from 1970 for four years, majoring in painting, drawing and philosophy of art. She came to New Zealand for a summer holiday in the 1974. By 1976, she was still in New Zealand, living in Devonport, Auckland, and working as a news photographer. She had a large factory-studio and it was here that she had the time to concentrate on lead and chalk pastel drawings as well as working on a vocabulary of images from her new experiences in New Zealand-Aotearoa.
Griffin exhibited regularly from 1978 till 1994. Her first exhibition was a series of 'life-size' drawings in pencil and chalk at the Little Theatre at Auckland University. They all sold. After that, she was represented by Denis Cohn in Auckland from 1979 - 1990 and had many shows during those years. She was awarded Queen Elizabeth 2 Arts Council grants in 1983, 1984, 1989 and 1990 and showed in group touring exhibitions.
In a cultural epoch enthralled with spectacle, Sally Griffin’s work reminds us of the subtle power of presence. She dignifies daily life - interiors, historical figures and events, the traces of activism - without grandstanding. Instead, she asks us to pause, reflect, and witness. There is quiet radicalism in her refusal to conjure drama; she finds drama in the fragility of memory, the beauty of domestic routines, the dignity of public commemoration.
Through her disciplined palette, structural compositions, and humanist impulse, Griffin crafts a compelling chapter in contemporary painting: one in which realism meets poetic interiority, and fragments reveal worlds. In Sally Griffin’s refined visual narratives, the understated becomes unforgettable.