Mary Griffiths: Everything and All of Us

Everything and All of Us brings together drawings and prints by Mary Griffiths spanning the last ten years.

It also includes a specially commissioned large-scale wall drawing and artworks selected by the artist from the University of Leeds’ Cultural Collections.

As Griffiths’ first major institutional show, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s collaborative approach. This has led her to work closely with poets, musicians, biophysicists, astronomers, physicists and engineers.

Griffiths’ geometric abstract works distil sophisticated ideas in a poetic way. Her practice seamlessly bridges the macroscopic and the microscopic and moves from the cosmological to the atomic. Often, her artworks also explore individual and collective memories and histories, as well as Northern, working-class and feminist identities. Her distinctive drawing process involves applying layer upon layer of graphite to a surface and polishing it to a mirror sheen before cutting linear forms into it.

Immersive, subtle and profound, Griffiths' slowly wrought art demands, and repays, slow looking.

Mary Griffiths is the Gatenby Fellow at the University of Leeds.

The exhibition is accompanied by a printed catalogue (digital version available here).

Image: Mary Griffiths, ‘Astley Ribbon’, 2017, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood. © The Artist (Photo: Michael Pollard).