Introduction
Laura Claveria
As a socially engaged University Art Gallery, our exhibitions aim to make people think and feel differently about the world we live in with a view to bringing about positive change. We also seek to widen understanding of what research can be, do or look like. So, when I was first introduced to Mary Griffiths’ work, it instantly felt the perfect fit for us.
Griffiths’ cooperative and enquiry-led approach has taken her to closely work with poets, musicians, biophysicists, astronomers, physicists and engineers throughout her career. During her fruitful Gatenby Fellowship at the University of Leeds (2023 – 2025), she has had the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues across campus, including the School of English, Faculty of Engineering and Science and School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, to mention just a few.
Encountering first hand Griffiths’ graphite drawings and prints is an unforgettable experience. They draw you into a multi-layered and complex universe that, like the very cosmos around us, feels like something much bigger than all of us. Her geometrical, abstract works render complicated and sophisticated ideas in a distilled and poetic way. Previous starting points for her practice have included scientific graphs, images of cellular DNA, musical compositions, archives, literature, industrial sites, machinery and domestic architectures. Her methodology usually involves sketching dozens of figurative drawings in A6 notebooks that capture details and elements that interest her. She then closely observes their structure and rhythm, properties and qualities, gravity and tone – until she starts to perceive specific patterns, all of which are subsequently translated into a dense matrix of lines. Her seemingly objective designs are, however, strongly infused with personal meaning. Her artworks often explore aspects of both individual and collective memories and histories as well as Northern, working-class and feminist identities and politics.
As a whole, Griffiths’ work seamlessly bridges the macroscopic and the microscopic and moves from the cosmological to the atomic. It is also driven by the idea that, from our DNA molecules to the farthest galaxy, almost everything shares carbon as its dominant element. It is no wonder, therefore, that the artist’s signature medium is graphite, another form of carbon. Her drawings require her to painstakingly apply many layers of graphite by hand. These are then burnished to create a dark, reflective surface on which lines are incised with great precision. These are works that require a very focused mind and that take a very long time to complete. It is perhaps for this very reason that they also seem to demand, and reward, slow observation by the viewer.
As Griffiths’ first major survey show, the exhibition Everything and All of Us features drawings and prints spanning the last ten years of the artist’s career. In addition, the exhibition is punctuated by prints, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and textiles from the Library’s Cultural Collections that hold a particular resonance for the artist. Understanding the collection as one of her many collaborators, this selection creates meaningful conversations between various traditions of abstraction. It includes artists she has long admired such as Barbara Hepworth and Bridget Riley, as well as lesser-known artists, including Mary Barker, Leeds University’s first female student of textiles. With them, she shares an affinity for geometry, symmetry, the use of line, colour, repetition and overlapping designs, as well as an interest in keeping human experiences at the centre. The exhibition also includes a new and ambitious commission. Entitled Prophet, this large-scale mesmerizing wall drawing responds to the architecture of the gallery itself, in particular one of its recesses, connecting it with memories and observations of the artist’s family home.
Immersive, subtle and profound, like Mary Griffiths’ work itself, the exhibition Everything and All of Us invites us to question our own place in the world and we truly hope that it can be a site that sparks rich interdisciplinary conversations.
Laura Claveria is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery.
Everything and All of Us
Stella Halkyard
MODES
The phrase ‘everything and all of us’ has its source in the verse of the astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson with which the artist Mary Griffiths has long been concerned.1 Originally, Griffiths used it as the title for one of her drawings, then for the series of drawings and suite of prints which subsequently emerged. Now she has come to regard it as the concept that best captures not only her practice as an artist but also the ethos of her art. For at its heart the idea of ‘everything and all of us’ recognises the centrality of collaboration within the processes of creative endeavour.
As Griffiths observes:
‘I have begun to foster a new way of working within my artistic practice seeking out collaborations with peers and others within and beyond the field of fine art… Now an essential strand of my practice, collaboration is often the mode through which new work springs.’ 2
Reflecting on a working life spent as a curator before becoming a full-time artist, she now understands that collaboration has always been part of her practice whether curating the work of artists like Cornelia Parker, Marina Abramovic, Raqs Media Collective and Elizabeth Price or taking masterclasses in absentia from ‘the great drawings in the collection of the Whitworth by Barbara Hepworth, Bridget Riley, Turner and others.’ 3
Formed from Griffiths’ productive conversations with a panoply of poets, writers, composers, musicians, astronomers, biophysicists, physicists and engineers, Everything and All of Us is now also an exhibition which presents her geometrically inflected, abstract explorations of space. These works take us on a journey from the intimate nooks of home and houses and the confines of the body’s cells to the landscapes
of the once industrial North and the cosmic architecture of the universe. It also includes a selection of prints, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and textiles from the collections at the University of Leeds which, steeped in traditions of abstraction, hold particular resonance for the artist.
DWELLINGS
The meaning of the word ‘dwelling’, as a place of abode, conjures notions, memories and images of houses and homes. The lived experience of significant houses from Griffiths’ childhood is a recurring preoccupation of her work. The house she was born in, for example, (re)appears nebulously in her drawings as she retraces the many layered experiences of this inhabited space, knowing that ‘the house we were born in is physically inscribed within us.’4 Returning to the site of her first solo exhibition at Bureau in Manchester in 2012 we can encounter her first major wall drawing entitled Constellation. Here, the artist covers a wall (4 x 2 metres) in layers of graphite and then with the back of a spoon polishes the entire surface until it achieves a mirror-black shine. Layers of lines are cut into this surface to reveal the white of the plaster beneath, in arrangements that eventually shift two dimensions into three. Rendered in the abstract form of Griffiths’ idiom this drawing’s architectural notation is sufficiently legible, at least to those who share her Irish heritage, to evoke the house at Wimbletown in County Dublin from where her mother’s family came. Through art her house assumes ‘an airy structure that moves on the breath of time’ 5 allowing her to presence her ancestors and carry their histories and culture with her.6
Buried within the materiality of her artistic practice the ancestral makes its presence felt across the corpus of her work. And while houses may indeed be the ‘anthropo-cosmic tissue of a human life’7 our first actual dwelling is, in fact, engraved within the DNA of our cells. Since 2020 Griffiths has been working in partnership with a group of biophysicists,8 on a project which has drawn together the idea of ‘everything and all of us’ through their shared investigations of the concepts of ‘repetition’, ‘pattern’ and ‘anomaly’. Using the visual data of cell development and the abstract syntax of Griffiths’ drawings, they have delineated, in three-dimensions, the organisation of the genome within the body’s cells and its habit of clustering in neighbourhoods. Griffiths has then translated this language of a geometry of genetics (shared in visual form across both art and science) into a series of graphite drawings and a suite of etchings. Echoing the body’s art of cellular replication, each one made by hand, and as unique and individual as its human source, they are shown together for the first time here in Leeds.
TOPOGRAPHIES
Dwelling as an act is not, however, confined to the inner recesses of a body or the rooms within a house, it extends into the topographical space of the physical world beyond. Defined as the detailed delineation of a particular locality,9 the topographical, in its urban, rural, and industrial guises, has long been a focus of Griffiths’ work. In her strong emotional attachment to the region of England’s north, where she was born and lives, she is a committed ‘topophiliac’10 and the engagement with Northern life and its spaces presented through her work stems from the ‘perspective of an existential insider.’11 Refusing to picture the North of her life-space in the conventional terms of a figurative, social-realist idiom, Griffiths tells of its textures through the syntax of a geometric abstraction that is rendered ‘expressive of local uniqueness … loved and intimately known.’12 This approach can be seen in the work she produced in 2015 at the University of Manchester, where graphene was first isolated. Measuring thirteen metres by two, From Seathwaite, is a vast, permanent wall drawing which extends, basement to ceiling, over the five storeys of the National Graphene Institute’s atrium. This drawing distils graphite’s long history and its transformation into graphene through the actual medium of which it speaks. Layer upon layer of graphite was applied by hand to create a deep stratigraphy by Griffiths and her team.13 Burnished to a mirror polish she then cut into its surface with a scribe to reveal the plaster beneath and mapped, like a geologist, the topographical features of the landscape, humanised to include the Cumbrian graphite mine at Seathwaite.
So, compressed onto a seemingly humdrum wall within a university building two Ideas of North14 collide as the volcanics of Borrowdale erupt into the glassy tower blocks of urbanised, Mancunian cityscape. Reading from top to bottom, the viewer’s eye scrolls down a zigzag line which shows the steepness of the path climbed by miners to reach the mine. This was the first, and for centuries, only place in the world where graphite was found. A path-like line edges down the wall into the second panel to reveal a crystalline, hexagonal structure of a single atom of graphite capturing its transmutation into graphene. The third panel shows single atoms of graphene crystals in tessellated form suggestive of some of the particular qualities of this new wonder material which is five times lighter than aluminium, two hundred times more resistant than steel and one million times thinner that the diameter of a single human hair. A portable, abbreviated version of this work has been included in this exhibition, entitled ‘After Seathwaite’. Through the medium of a scoured graphite drawing on gesso and board, a single graphite/graphene crystal sparkles in response to the visitor’s gaze.
Griffiths and her collaborator, Kostya Novoselov continued to explore graphene’s microscopic topography,15 and their dialogue resulted in the creation of the digital drawing ‘Prospect Planes’ which is included in this exhibition. As Griffiths explains,16 this work was produced by ‘taking my pencil drawing and patterning it in 2D with a single layer of graphene atoms, an animated digital work was created from the graphene data and revealed its ability to spawn myriad geometric abstract drawings when rotated’. These miniature kinetic works could then be made visible and displayed as projections and prints. ‘Prospect Planes’ was presented at the Great Exhibition of the North in 2018.
ELEMENTS
Inhabiting northern life-spaces, real or imagined, implies a ‘willingness to encounter … uplands, adverse weather [and] the intractable elements of climate.’17 Meteorology, the science that charts the fluctuations, cyclicity and power of atmospheric phenomena records that the coldest and wettest places in England are to be found within the North (the latter notably at Seathwaite). So in 2022 when Griffiths won a Northern Voices commission from the ensemble Manchester Collective to produce a series of drawings in response to the composer Michael Gordon’s ‘Weather’, she was in her element. Composed in 1998 in four movements, this genre-transgressive orchestral piece for amplified strings is inspired by the terrifying power of a violent storm. Testing the relationships between sound and image, Griffiths’ task was to produce a creative response to the work. This resulted in four bold and resonant panel drawings, which echo each movement of Gordon’s piece. With little understanding of musical scoring Griffiths immersed herself in each movement as she drew, seeking to surface the structure of its architecture. These drawings were included as an integral element within Manchester Collective’s performance of ‘Weather’ at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester in September 2022.
COSMOLOGIES
Dark matter is what Griffiths found when she was commissioned to make a work of art in response to the email archive of the publishers Carcanet Press relating to the Rebecca Elson’s posthumous publication A Responsibility to Awe. Having previously developed an affinity with Elson’s poetry, published by Carcanet, Griffiths sought her out as a source of inspiration. But Elson’s untimely death precluded the exchange of any correspondence (electronic or otherwise) between the distinguished astronomer and poet and the Press. So, like an astronomer herself using indirect methods to investigate dark or missing matter, Griffiths extended her search for evidence of 8
Elson in the emails exchanged between the various parties who collected her poems for publication. Through a complex process of abstraction, the words of the emails were then turned first into numbers then data, then graphs and ultimately into a visual image, scored into graphite on board to make For this we go out dark nights. Thereby creating a manifestation of a ‘contemporary cosmology … a kind of geometry … which has collapsed into points of mass that throw off light, much as abstractions collapse into words.’18 And in the black starlight at the centre of the work, gravity pulls, and we discern the presence of Rebecca Elson, darkly.
In such images ‘we have the impression that the stars in heaven come to live on earth [for] the houses of [humankind] form earthly constellations.’19 And so we are returned home to the house of Griffiths’ persistent preoccupation. This time in the form of a new wall drawing, entitled Prophet which has been especially commissioned for this exhibition and is the first work to emerge from her current collaboration with the writer Tony Crowley at the University of Leeds.
Stella Halkyard is a writer and former Head of Special Collections at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester.
1 Rebecca Elson, ‘The Expanding Universe’ and ‘Antidotes to Fear of Death’ in A Responsibility to Awe (Manchester, Carcanet, 1999) pp.10 and 61.
2 Conversation with the artist, 2023.
3 Conversation with the artist, 2023.
4 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, Beacon Press, 1964), p.14.
5 Ibid, p.56.
6 Cynthia Cruz The Melancholia of Class (London: Repeater Books, 2021), p.9.
7 Bachelard (1964), p.22.
8 Professor Caroline Austin (Newcastle University), Professor Sarah Harris (formerly University of Leeds, now The University of Sheffield), Professor Job Dekker (University of Massachusetts, Chan Medical School) and Professor Leonid Mirny (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
9 Oxford English Dictionary, online.
10 See definition of ‘Topophilia’ in Yu-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p.93.
11 Vit Ladislav, The Landscapes of W.H. Auden’s Interwar poetry (Oxford: Taylor Francis, 2022), p.34.
12 Ibid, p.33.
13 The team included Nina Chua, Nicola Ellis and Naomi Lethbridge.
14 Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion Books, 2005).
15 Sir Kostya Novoselov and Sir Andre Geim were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on graphene.
16 Conversation with the artist, 2015.
17 Davidson (2005), p.9.
18 Elson (1999), p.87.
19 Bachelard (1964), p.35.
Sweet Briar (Yates & Thom), 2017, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
Everything and All of Us 1 (2), 2023, inscribed graphite on paper.
Everything and All of Us 2 , 2022, inscribed graphite on paper.
Everything and All of Us 3, 2022, inscribed graphite on paper.
Weather 1, 2022, inscribed graphite on paper. Weather 2 , 2022, inscribed graphite on paper.
Weather 3, 2022, inscribed graphite on paper. Weather 4 , 2022, inscribed graphite on paper.
Slipway, 2014, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
Piece , 2017, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
Prospect
Prospect (Shifting), 2020, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
The Not Yet Star (2) , 2023, inscribed gouache on gesso on panel.
Enough for Immortality, 2020, inscribed graphite on silver leaf, gouache and gesso on plywood.
Circuit Gate, 2018, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
For this we go out dark nights , 2022, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
courtesy of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
Image
Parallel Elevation , 2018, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
Ecliptic , 2016, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
Upcast , 2017, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
After Seathwaite , 2015, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
Rotor , 2016, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
Astley Ribbon, 2018, inscribed graphite on gesso on plywood.
Everything and All of Us , 2024, inscribed Perspex, stainless steel.
Everything and All of Us (Blue) 1, 2024, etching, blue and silver ink on paper.
Everything and All of Us (Blue) 2 , 2024, etching, blue and silver ink on paper.
Everything and All of Us (Blue) 3, 2024, etching, blue and silver ink on paper.
Prospect 1, 2024, etching, blue and silver ink on paper.
Prospect 2 , 2024, etching, blue and silver ink on paper.
Prospect 3, 2024, etching, blue and silver ink on paper.
Prospect 4 , 2024, etching, blue and silver ink on paper.
Prophet , 2024, inscribed graphite on plaster on board.
Prophet: Memory, Place, Representation
Tony Crowley
‘The place a memory, the memory a place.’
Sometimes our language deceives us with its seeming transparency; words are never more treacherous than when we take their meaning to be clear and simply given. ‘Memory’ is such a word. Though it is a commonplace term, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tells us that historically 18 distinct meanings for ‘memory’ have been recorded. They are divided into three main senses that relate to: the action or process of commemorating, recollecting, or remembering; the faculty of recalling to mind; something that perpetuates remembrance or stimulates the memory. All the major English meanings are present in the Latin etymological root, ‘memoria’, and such is the significance of the word, in specialised and ordinary use, that it has produced more than one hundred compounds, ranging from ‘artificial memory’ (coined in 1545) to ‘memory stick’ (1997).
One OED definition of ‘memory’ points to an aspect of the complexity of the term: ‘the faculty by which things are remembered, considered as residing in the awareness or consciousness of a particular individual or group.’ The difficulty is not helped by the awkwardness of the wording, but the key point here is the proposed alternative between individual and collective memory. Of course there is an easy way of thinking about this distinction: memory can be individual (‘subjective’, to use another slippery term) or it can be collective (formed, for example, in relation to classes, genders, ethnic identities, nations, and so on). Yet the suggestion of an either/or opposition here is problematic. Is collective memory, in all its forms, anything but the settled result of the practical labour of individuals at specific historical moments? And is individual memory free of the collective experience that moulds us? Are my memories not mediated by the culture that has shaped me?
If ‘memory’ is a tricky term, then so too are ‘place’ and ‘representation’. ‘Place’ again seems to be an easy and familiar word, but on analysis it turns out to be complicated. Derived from the Latin ‘platea’, ‘street’, ‘place’ has 39 recorded meanings, with more than 270 compounds ranging from ‘wonning-place’ (‘dwelling place’, coined in 1303) to ‘happy place’ (1994). Perhaps the most recognizable meaning is given in the OED definition of ‘a particular part of region of space; a physical locality.’ Yet the limits of this account are quickly apparent. Take a place like Liverpool. Does ‘Liverpool’ refer simply to a physical locality? Is it just a geographical location whose boundaries can be found on a map? But then, as Adrienne Rich once pointed out, ‘a place on the map is also a place in history,’2 which is to say that what ‘Liverpool’ refers to is not simply an earthly (geo) location, but a historical and cultural construct. Perhaps the easiest way of thinking about this complication is through the phrase ‘a sense of place’. For although grounded in physical reality, no one’s sense of the place in which they grew up is restricted to bricks and mortar. Feelings, evocations, imaginings and, again, culturally shaped memories are central to our sense of ‘being from’ a particular place. ‘Where were you born?’ isn’t the same question as ‘where are you from?’
‘Representation’ may be the most difficult of the three keywords under consideration, though its history is the simplest. There are only eight compounds, ranging from ‘misrepresentation (1641) to ‘knowledge representation’ (a phrase from the jargon of computing coined in 1972). And there are just two main senses, both of which appear in English from the fifteenth century. The first is ‘standing for, or in the place of, a person, group, or thing’ (a conception that became significant in the realm of politics, not least in the notion of ‘representative democracy’). The second is ‘a depiction or portrayal of a person or thing, typically one produced in an artistic medium’ (a sense that became crucial in modern – and indeed modernist – debates in aesthetics). The two meanings have distinct difficulties. The political sense of ‘representation’ is dogged by the recurrent question of legitimacy – simply put, what is the process by which one person or group ‘stands for’ or ‘in the place of’ others? The aesthetic sense of ‘representation’ is more complex and its intricacy is revealed in its etymology. The root is the Latin verb ‘re-praesentare’, whose meanings include ‘to present to view, exhibit, to show or present in person, to make present to the mind, to revive, to portray, to resemble, imitate.’ There are various semantic strands here: repetition –‘to make present again;’ sight – ‘to present to view;’ signification – ‘to make present to the mind;’ similitude – ‘to portray, resemble, imitate.’ Central to this cluster of meanings, however, are two ideas that appear to be opposed. The first emphasises the re-presenting of something that exists prior to the act of representation, whereas 42
the second stresses the creativity of representation – the making of something that stimulates the mind. These different views were what was at stake in the often tortuous debates around ‘realism’ in the twentieth century.
We saw earlier that the meanings of ‘memory’ and ‘place’ can be problematic in their suggestion of false oppositions (individual versus collective in the case of ‘memory’, physical versus cultural in ‘place’). With ‘representation’, the dichotomy appears to lie between the ‘real’, the pre-existent world that is to be represented (to various degrees of accuracy), and the creative world of the artist’s imagination. But this is another misleading contrast. For although there is no denying material reality, our access to that reality is only available through the creativity of the historical and cultural forms of knowledge and experience that shape us – and are shaped by us – in a continuing process. Thought of in this way, representation is not the reflection of a given world, but a creative response to that world within the contours of received but flexible ways of perceiving and understanding. Not the least of the advantages of this way of thinking about representation is that it makes creativity part of our everyday Prophet (detail), 2024, inscribed graphite on plaster on board.
practical activity. And nowhere is this more evident than in our stable and yet open language – in the variable terms and meanings that mark our creative ways of responding to and making sense of our changing historical reality.
Thus far I have attempted a brief linguistic clarification of three keywords: ‘memory’, ‘place’, ‘representation’. But what if we combine them to ask a question that has formed part of my ongoing collaborative discussion with the artist Mary Griffiths: how can we represent the memory of place? It’s worth saying that Mary and I were both born and raised in Merseyside working-class homes but met in Manchester where I worked at the university and Mary was a curator at the Whitworth Art Gallery. We met again here at Leeds, where I am a Professor of English Language and she is the Gatenby Fellow in the School of Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. As we talked, we discovered that we had a shared interest in a particular place (Liverpool) and the question of representing our memories of it, specifically memories of our childhoods in it.
My own work on Liverpool focusses on language and takes the form of a historical and theoretical study: Scouse: A Social and Cultural History (2012), a dictionary: The Liverpool English Dictionary 1850–2015 (2017), and a hybrid text: Liverpool: A Memoir of Words (2023).3 The last work is a departure from the strictly academic focus of the first two as it combines social history, the history of language (specifically Liverpool words), and personal memoir (rather than conventional autobiography). It is an attempt to use language to address the issue of representing the memory of a particular place at a specific historical moment – a wordbook consisting of a series of short essays (‘Ace, ‘Bommie’, ‘Cash’, ‘Dekko’, ‘Easy six’, ‘Footy’, ‘Gobshite’… all the way to ‘Z-Cars’) that aim to paint word-pictures, to capture moments of space and time, to depict subjective and historical shards. Guided by the historian David Kynaston’s insight that ‘so often, it is the brief suggestive fragment that tells the larger story,’4 Liverpool: A Memoir of Words is self-consciously a storybook of memories, a summoning of history, and an evocation infused with personal meaning and yet open to the interpretation of others.
It would be easy to contrast the discursive style of Liverpool: A Memoir of Words with the abstract technique of Mary Griffiths’ artistic creation Prophet. We work in different media, with distinct genres, within diverse traditions… the differences could not be clearer. And yet there are profound similarities too (if there were not, our conversations could not have been as open and productive as they have been), and they are suggested by that complex term ‘abstract’. Again, the etymology 44
is helpful: ‘abstract’ derives from the Latin ‘abstractus’, from the verb ‘abstrahere’, whose various meanings include ‘to draw from, appropriate, set free.’ Conceived in one sense, ‘abstraction’ could recall that old putative dichotomy between reality and the mind of the artist. Yet understood in another way, ‘abstraction’ can refer to our very understanding of reality, the way we become aware of it, the means by which we frame it and articulate our practical response to it. Consider terms like ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘space’, ‘time’, ‘history’, ‘past’, ‘present’ – these and many terms like them (‘memory, place’, ‘representation’…) are ‘abstract’: portals, drawn from history, but made our own (appropriated) in creative ways (set free).
How then to represent the memories of a working-class childhood in a particular time and a specific place? How to ‘evoke’ (‘évocáre’, to call out) the past? How to conjure a flat above a disused shop, a staircase from a backyard, a living room, a back room, a front door that became a window, windows that were blocked up, an alcove cupboard, a bookcase sawn up many years later to make panels for artworks? How to capture the creativity of memory? There are many ways of doing it: we can talk about it, we can make written word pictures, and the more skilled of us can forge art.
Mary Griffiths’ Prophet (the reference is to Prophet Street in the Dingle, Liverpool) makes place memory and memory place. Using carbon, the material that launched us into modernity and whose effects we now have to escape, she has produced a drawing that – like memory itself – reflects and refracts at one and the same time. Dense and intense, geometric and oneiric, coruscating and nebulous, the artwork has become a creative, magical portal grounded in material history. The intimate yet public intricacy of its design demonstrates that although the route from the present to the past via memory is never a straight line, it can take the form of a complex series of straight lines.
Tony Crowley is Professor of English Language in the School of English, University of Leeds.
1 Matt Simpson, ‘Blossom Street’, in An Elegy for the Galosherman (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1990), p.75.
2 Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1986), p.212.
3 Tony Crowley, Liverpool: A Memoir of Words (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023).
4 David Kynaston, Modernity Britain, 1957–62 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p.345.
First published in 2024 on the occasion of the exhibition
Mary Griffiths: Everything and All of Us
The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery 24 October 2024 – 8 March 2025
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted © The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, except where otherwise stated
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and of the publishers.
To the best of our knowledge, the list of exhibited artworks is accurate at the time of printing.
The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery University of Leeds Parkinson Building Woodhouse Lane Leeds LS2 9JT
Design RachelO StudiO Print Production TEAM, Printed on 100% recycled paper
All images ©The Artist unless otherwise stated. All photos by Michael Pollard unless otherwise stated.
ISBN-13 978-1-874331-71-1
Cover image:
Mary Griffiths, Everything and All of Us 1 (2) (detail), 2023
Inscribed graphite on paper.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are deeply grateful to Mary Griffiths, Stella Halkyard, Tony Crowley, Thom Green, Naomi Lethbridge, Fionnuala Kennedy, Ella Georgiou, Rachel Oliver, Alex Santos, Tony Rae, Karanjit Panesar, Melissa Burntown, Layla Bloom, Fred Pepper, Laura Millward, Jill Winder, Laura Beare, Rowland Thomas, Lauren Hollowday, Laura Wilson, Claire Evans, Alison Tate, Abigail Boon, Danilo Dondici, Ellen Dutton, Phoebe Greenwood, Rebecca Higgins, Sophia Lambert, Cat Lane, Helen Price, Farwa Rizvi, Laura Smith, Paul Smith, Neema Stephenson, Daniel Sykes, Katherine Tiller, Qona Wright, Jenny Haynes, Josh Sendall, and University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection, Masud Khokhar.
The artist would also like to thank: Caroline Austin, Maria Balshaw, Brighter Sound, Ellen Burroughs, Laura Claveria, Joanne Crawford, Job Dekker, Wieke Eringa, Sarah Harris, Hot Bed Press, Ink on Paper Press, Emma Lloyd, Sara Lowes, Manchester Collective, Jo McGonigal, Leonid Mirny, Kostya Novoselov, Cornelia Parker, Elizabeth Price, David Remfry, John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Michael Schmidt, Helen Waters, Jane and Louise Wilson.
With special thanks to Kate and Jason Gatenby for their generous support of the Gatenby Cultural Fellowship.
ISBN-13 978-1-874331-71-1
