SALLY COLAHAN GRIFFIN was born in Melbourne and, from a very early age, was covering the long laminated bar, which acted as a room divider between kitchen and lounge, with drawings. Sometimes they were ajaxed off, sometimes they survived a few days. On this surface, she had her first lessons in drawing.

After graduating from four years of art training in Melbourne city specialising in painting, drawing and philosophy of art, she came to New Zealand for a holiday in the summer of 1974.  By 1976, she was still in New Zealand and working as a newspaper photographer and exhibiting regularly at the Denis Cohn Gallery in Auckland. She was  also exploring mural painting as a way of painting large surfaces with a storytelling art. 

The Melbourne art school Griffin attended for four years and the ‘scene’ influenced her early colour-field work, but figurative narratives were her real artistic interest and her large scale murals developed her multi-layered narrative language. An outdoor mural in Whangarei about the history of Northland survived only months after it was completed amidst controversy and media attention.

Griffin’s art has an allegorical edge and is mostly figurative and sometimes surrealist. As a daughter of an artistic mother and modernist architect father, her art has been influenced by 1950s modernism and the break through sixties - blending lyric dream and worldly experience.

Landscapes from New Zealand and Australia feature in Griffin’s paintings and viewers are invited to be attracted and intrigued by a combination of images and experiences. In the paintings, time periods co-exist. Fragmentation and montage are very much our way of seeing these days but rather deconstruction, Griffin is interested in using fragments of reality to create and construct a new and inclusive narrative.