Catherine Griffiths, Sound Tracks, 2011
Hit the Wall is a unique project designed to showcase the work of graphic designers from New Zealand and around the world. In Sound Tracks, New Zealand typographer and graphic designer Catherine Griffiths explores vowel sounds for the 'Hit The Wall' space in the gallery.
Visitors in the foyer can look up to be confronted by a large AEIOU emerging out of a network of converging and overlapping white lines, tracking in unison against a jet black background. Griffiths manipulates her drawing through digital and analogue distortion—printing, scanning and enlarging the image to produce reverberating letterforms. Sound Tracks is the second installation in the artist's 'AEIOU' series. The first work—a typographic sound sculpture (AEIOU, 2009)—is a construction of five vowels in steel, stacked five metres high on the first-level terrace of Cubana Apartments in Wellington.
Catherine Griffiths (b. 1966) is a designer and typographer based in Auckland and Paris, widely recognised for applying her practice to distinctly different contexts and environments, from pocket-sized artist books to public sculpture in architecture and the landscape.