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 invention. The result is art that pulses with significance: familiar, intimate, yet mysteriously expansive.

Griffin’s canvases, often rooted in personal narrative, transport us from domestic interiors to public memory. Whether evoking a the 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. Her 1993 Women’s Suffrage Memorial Mural in New Lynn - exemplifies her narrative ambition, honoring Kate Sheppard and other suffragists in bold, modernist form. These works reveal her art as a vehicle for communal memory, scaled up to speak to civic identity, forging links between past and present in New Zealand.

Her earlier decades spent as a documentary and portrait photographer - covering artists and political figures in the 1970s and ’80s - infused her painterly eye with intimacy, empathy, and historical bearing. Her images reflect a discipline of observation and personal engagement, carrying over into the painterly compositions she produces today.

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 new biography My Own Sort of Heaven: A life of Rosalie Gascoigne by Nicola Francis, published by ANU Press.

With the Piedog Press label, Griffin’s painted and photographic images are accessible to buy at an affordable price with the advances of modern-day printing. Sally has always wanted people who enjoyed her art to be able to have it in one form or another. Piedog Press prints are certainly one way to do this.

Piedog Press invites you to take a look at the SHOP and welcomes orders and inquiries. A PDF of images is also available - just ask!

Metropolis

Promenade

Pink and Lemon

Dream Walker