Alison Griffin
Alison Griffin's work explores her relationship with memory, landscape and place - both her everyday surroundings, and places of the past. She works in pencil to create intimate contemplations of everyday landscapes and uses the depths and tones of the medium to capture light and shadow and an underlying unease.
In 2026 Griffin was elected a Member of the Society of Graphic Fine Art and she has exhibited with the society every year since 2020 at the Mall Galleries, London. Other notable group exhibitions in 2026 include “A Day in May” with John Martin Gallery, Spirit Studios and Auto amor, “Duality” with Gray Area Gallery in Norwich and the Sir John Hurt Art Prize Shortlist Exhibition with Holt Art Projects (also 2024). In 2026 Griffin won the main prize at DRAW26 at Wisbech Gallery and received Highly Commended at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Drawing Prize Exhibition in 2025. Griffin graduated with a degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martin's in 2012 when Jonathan Jones of The Guardian described her degree show work as “curious and memorable,” and a “brilliantly authoritative” drawing. She has work in private collections nationally and internationally and lives and works in Norwich.
Artist Statement
My current work explores my relationship with memory, landscape and place and features both the rural and built environments as I try to capture the beauty of nature or the banality of small town housing estates. In doing so I'm taken on a journey of reflection and contemplation - memories are delicately woven into the intricate patterns and shapes of my surroundings. Drawing is my passion and the focus of my practice, my obsession with detail totally absorbing. I work in pencil to create intimate and atmospheric representations of the natural world and everyday landscapes. The depth and tones of the pencil are used to create images permeated with light and shadow and an underlying subtle tension, a sense of ‘otherness.’ The images evoke a profound melancholic yearning for an absent something or someone; creating a shrine-like sense of time elapsed, longing and missingness. I hope the work provokes a similar reaction in the viewer, feelings of nostalgia, ruminations on the past and our sense of place in the world, collective memories.
