(tra)digital reveries | Anna Griffiths

About

The work of self-taught artist Anna Griffiths combines the intimacy of traditional hand-painted and hand-drawn gestures with digital technologies that mediate her imaginative expression. Her approach to collage techniques is conceptual, consciously considering the expansive possibilities that can be generated when visual fragments are manipulated and recontextualized. Beginning with found images of female figures that provide the central inspiration for the pictorial worlds she builds around them, Griffiths constructs new meanings through a process of association, juxtaposition, and addition which she evocatively describes as “harvesting/harmonizing the chaos”. The ultimate presentation of these experiments in tradigitalism is in three different formats - giclée print on watercolour paper, monoprints on aluminum, and shadowbox paper dioramas.

Colourful and inviting (re)compositions which are at once evocative and disorienting, these collages reveal fragments of larger imaginary narratives whose full scope remains elusive. Griffiths states that the multiple thematic concerns identifiable within this series include mental health and emotional turmoil, power and vulnerability, and issues of gendered embodiment as experienced at different stages of the “presumed natural order of growth and maturation”. Griffiths has expressed her desire to “highlight the fragility of literal interpretation” - and the notions of multiplicity which inform both her chosen subject matter and the combined digital/physical process of its creation alike defy singular categorization. In the hybrid dreamscapes of (tra)digital reveries, questions of determining the authentic from the reconstructed, reality from illusion have lessened urgency  - instead, we are encouraged to marvel and lose ourselves in the intriguing in-between.

Curatorial text by Talia Golland