Joanna Griffin: Breaking the Surface

Joanna Griffin is an artist based in London who makes short films and installation. She studied at the University of Edinburgh and in New Mexico and at present teaches at the art academy in Winchester. She has exhibited at Galeria del Grabado de Chile, Santiago, The Bond Gallery, Birmingham and Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery. A small publication was produced with an essay by Claire Doherty. Breaking the Surface was funded and supported by Plymouth Arts Centre, Picture This, Arts and Humanities Research Board and University of Southampton.

For the exhibition for Plymouth Arts Centre, Griffin recorded radio telescopes and helicopters and the coming and going of submarines on the Plymouth sound, bringing together mythologies and folk tales of the sea with the harsh realities of engineered machinery. Working with the substance of surveillance - the digital recording, the monitor, the film archive of innocuous military exercises, the note-taking, the watching and waiting - Griffin resists creating a theatre of spectacular narratives. Rather the impact of her work is quiet and slow burning. It elicits a strong sense of foreboding in the unsuspecting viewer by exploring the associations of a society under observation.

Exhibition:
23 August – 22 September 2002, Plymouth Arts Centre, Plymouth, Devon