Catherine Griffiths
Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa

Catherine Griffiths is an artist and designer whose practice unfolds through language, material, and space. Over four decades, she has worked at the intersection of typography and sculpture—shifting words beyond the page and into physical, spatial experience.

Grounded in graphic design yet extending into an expanded, interdisciplinary field, her work moves across installation, public art, publishing, and time-based media. Language becomes both subject and substance: stretched, fragmented, illuminated, and reassembled to alter how it is read, felt, and encountered.

Griffiths works with scale and immersion—drawing the viewer into situations where meaning is not fixed, but contingent. Through light, sound, and form, she opens spaces for interpretation, where reading becomes a spatial act and understanding emerges through movement and attention.

Improvisation sits at the core of her practice. Works evolve through response—site, context, and material shaping each outcome. Across architectural, public, and intimate settings, her interventions invite a slower engagement with language, asking us to read between, around, and beyond.

Alongside Bruce Connew, Griffiths co-runs Vapour Momenta Books, a self-publishing platform where the artist book is treated as a complete object—its typography, materiality, and structure inseparable from its content.

Her work continues to navigate the edges of communication—where language dissolves into form, and meaning remains open.