glynn gritffiths
Forward to exhibition hosted at Fifty, Mayfair with Grosvenor Estate, 2013
"Glynn Griffiths came fresh to sculpture with an extraordinary mixture of maturity and originality. He has always ploughed his own furrow to reveal a striking vigour in two testing media. Glynn was a self-taught schoolboy photographer and then in the 1970s became a journeyman-trained photojournalist in apartheid South Africa’s Cape Town. In London, from the late 1980s, he became one of The Independent’s famed staff photographers. In “Growth, Gravity & Balance”, Glynn Griffiths celebrates the engineering creativity of man and nature. His pods, seeds and husks look as though a dinosaur had spawned herself with factory-made eggs. His bows and arrows and scales and bridges look as though some clever primitive or technocrat castaway had stumbled on an endless supply
of the unvarying, humdrum cable-ties and polythene sheeting which we use every day. So amongst the natural wood and grasses, which Glynn works with ordinary – often practically Neanderthal – tools, there is a crucial and proud element of the industrial.
There is nothing elegiac or nostalgic or hectoring in Glynn Griffiths’s sculptures. They are not about green regret or fallen consumers. Rather, they are about the places where different sorts of making meet: the manufactured, the natural, the mechanical, the tactile, the primal and the sophisticated. They are enigmatic but not tricksy: they are liberating because they are about the marvels of creativity, and they leave the viewer free to fill in substantial blanks. That such works should flow from this man is not that surprising. His photojournalism has always shown a spirit which is unflinching but upbeat. Not over-taught, Glynn Griffiths’s photography is unpretentious but highly skilled and suggestive.
In the late 1970s, Glynn achieved his monochrome photographs from Cape Town’s Crossroads by being around the informal, desperately marginal township a lot, over months. His marvellous eye reveals people who cherish and maintain respectability, cleanliness and politeness in conditions of deprivation and danger. And then, back in South Africa in 1994 as a visiting photographer, Glynn captured his modestly triumphant portrait of Nelson Mandela as the President-to-be. Mandela was acknowledging the welcome of the tumultuous crowd in his last Cape Town rally before heading off to Johannesburg and the climax of the campaign for the first free elections in the country’s history. The Black Power salute is there, all right, but it is transformed into something which is relaxed and even friendly as well as forceful.“Nothing Will Separate Us” is a marvellous title for this collection of images: it was taken from the home-made medallion worn by one of the men in the Crossroads photographs.
South African born Glynn Griffiths is a former staff photographer with The Independent newspaper in London, England. In 2010 he won the prestigious Clifford Chance Sculpture Award for his large-scale
pieces exhibited in the MA degree show at Wimbledon College of Art [University of the Arts, London].After years as a photographer & picture editor, Glynn decided to work as a full-time sculptor.
