The Shapes of Sound

Ela Egidy

When someone complains that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ they usually utter this epithet dismissively. Their dismissal implies the absurdity of attempting to express one medium through another, in effect registering an inability to think across modes and media.1 Refusing the demands of disciplinary purity, the multi-modal work of artist and designer Catherine Griffiths might in fact celebrate the idea of ‘dancing about architecture’. In her work, this dance is not an absurd one; it is instead an invitation to traverse disciplines and to choreograph material dialogues between seemingly distinct modes of practice.

It is precisely the choreography of form, space, sound and material that characterises Griffiths’ expansive body of work. Griffiths, from Aotearoa New Zealand, situates her work at the intersections of typographic installation, time-based media and site-specific intervention. Her (typo)graphic assemblages – whether large-scale and public or small-scale and private – perform their own dances in space and across time, not in any kind of formal contradiction but with intention, rhythm and sensitivity. In Griffiths’ work abstract forms explode out of their conventional structures and formats. These shapes become extreme expressions of graphic form, manifesting as tactile, spatial encounters – inviting you to reach out and touch them.

Griffiths’ continual engagement with vowels serves as a fine example. In her work, vowels are not just linguistic necessities of communication, but elemental forms reduced to their simplest structural gestures: lines, curves, circles and, in Griffiths’ words, ‘the speech sounds that these elicit’. Griffiths has described observing audiences noticing shapes in what initially appear as abstract forms, leading them to playfully pronounce vowel sounds – ay ee eye oh you or, in te reo Māori, ah eh ee or oo – as the forms slowly reveal their meaning: AEIOU. These works are ciphers, abstract shapes gradually decoded by the audience’s participation, prompting them to utter an incantation. These sound forms are captured and recomposed into the sonic landscape of Griffiths’ work i, 2015, described by the artist as a ‘recording of speech and sound . . . a running stream of consciousness’. Previous works by Griffiths resurface here, layered and reassembled into a moving-image collage. Images and sounds loop and fold into each other, forming a continuous recomposition. In the background we see choreographer and dancer Oliver Connew move against an inert architectural structure. In this work the many layers can be read as having just as many meanings.

Architect Alessandro Zambelli describes architecture as a ‘form of sympathetic magic’.2 He frames architecture not just as the design and production of structures, but as a practice steeped in symbolic operations that bring things into being. Again in Zambelli’s words, ‘The architectural drawing, the CDM Regulations, the RIBA Plan of Work and the construction contract are not simply dumb representations or administrative tools; they give force to those systems they represent and presence to the objects of them (i.e., buildings).’3 The buildings may not yet exist, but they are nonetheless made real through these documents and their use.

This framing can also be applied to typography, which similarly operates through the conjuring power of form and association. Typographic marks act at both spatial and temporal distances. They summon meaning and affect across time and space, through shapes that bear no intrinsic value but are nonetheless laden with symbolic weight. The typographer has little choice but to work with these symbolic inheritances. The cipher AEIOU follows a sequential order determined by the Latin alphabet. AEIOU is also an enunciative task set for those learning to read. Letters signify through their form and their context. In AEIOU, 2009, described by the artist as a ‘typo/sound sculpture’, Griffiths stacks the letterforms bottom to top:

U

O

I

E

A

and in this small gesture of reversal asserts some agency in response to the imposed alphabetic structure. In the second iteration of the series, Sound Tracks, 2011, Griffiths abstracts the vowel forms even further, by isolating 1:1 sections from the original 7-metre wall work. Griffiths generates the reverberating letterforms by using a process of digital and analogue distortion, printing on an A4 printer, re-scanning and then digitally enlarging. These fragments become works too – their forms amplify the physical and sonic qualities latent in the original AEIOU sequence.

Vilém Flusser writes that ‘the universe of texts can be seen as a landscape’, a concept materially realised in Griffiths’ work.4 Typography becomes landscape, becomes architecture, becomes typography again. The works invite us to look at and move through and around these drawings installed both on and off the wall. As we navigate through these works in space, Griffiths invites our bodies to dance around them and our mouths to form the sounds they make. 

Griffiths often uses the vocabulary of music and sound when speaking about her work. She uses words such as ‘composition’, ‘tone’, ‘pitch’ and ‘improvisation’ frequently. This is a language that underscores a rhythmic, melodic sensibility. These words are not used merely as metaphors. Sound and silence, cadence and repetition – and their many iterative variations – shape her works. Through this sensibility, Griffiths transforms letters into environmental milieus, installations into performances, wordplay into bold statements. Compositions are shaped by rhythms and spatial harmonies, so much so that typography becomes a form of visual music, and we discover ourselves dancing the architecture of typographic form.

Both practices of architecture and of typography rely on an entangled relationship between material form and symbolic resonance. They shape environments, objects and communications in ways that influence perception, behaviour and feeling – often from afar, and long after the original designers have vanished. Griffiths draws her material palette from that of everyday construction, reshaping its forms into graphic expression. This deliberate selection of materials – concrete cast into letters, fluorescent-pink builder’s line pulled taut to draw in space, copper pipes precariously balancing on their base – highlights both their accessibility and their potential for transformation. By repurposing these ubiquitous construction materials, Griffiths accentuates the subtlety and precision of form, while embracing material instability and unpredictability over time.

Works such as Out of Line, 2025, Collidescape, 2015, installed 2017, Light Weight O, 2012, installed 2018, A Hillside Intervention, 2012, and Wellington Writers Walk, 2002, 2004, underscore Griffiths’ thoughtful engagement with architectural contexts. Each demonstrates a nuanced appreciation of both durability and ephemerality within the built environment. These installations evolve in harmony with their surroundings, shaped by weather, the shifting landscape and the passage of time. In Out of Line, conceived for the Design Gallery in the University of Melbourne’s Glyn Davis Building, Griffiths traces diurnal cycles of light that was once there but is now gone. Light that will return again, even if not at the time of your visit.

By inviting viewers to engage with typographic forms through the senses, Griffiths reconfigures our expectations of how language, light, space and sound might intersect, and the role perspective plays when viewing a work. Her work encourages us not only to read or listen but to also inhabit the space of typography fully – to feel its shape, move through its spaces and experience its rhythm. The embodied aspect of language extends beyond these utterances in which breath touches words, for Griffiths’ text-in-landscape works are ‘an extension of [her] body, of her mind, somehow’.5

So: dancing and architecture, typography and the uttering of sounds. On the surface, the latter pair – written forms and spoken sounds – may seem more intrinsically connected, bound by shared systems of language and representation. But the former, too, shares a deep connection. An obstruction in the path of a moving body forces it to bend, to shift, to arc in another direction – or else to collide. The body indeed dances to architecture, and in this movement of body in space we may find a form of resistance. In an essay titled ‘In praise of the dancing body’, Silvia Federici writes about ‘the body as a ground of resistance’. She argues that the body maintains ‘the power to act, to transform itself and the world’ and that the body, crucially, manifests ‘a natural limit to exploitation’.6 Federici is speaking about the history of the body in relation to its exploitation as part of an industrial production line. She writes: 

Our struggle must begin with the re-appropriation of our body, the revaluation and rediscovery of its capacity of resistance, and expansion and celebration of its powers, individual and collective.

Dance is central to this re-appropriation. In essence, the act of dancing is an exploration and invention of what the body can do: of its capacities, its languages, its articulations of the strivings of our being. . . . From dance we learn that matter is not stupid, it is not blind, it is not mechanical, but has its rhythms, has its language and it is self-activated and self-organising’.7

In Griffiths’ practice, the idea of ‘dancing about architecture’ transforms from a dismissal into an invitation to move, think and feel differently about form, space and the order of things in a world we collectively, and inequitably, inhabit. Federici’s notion of dance as bodily resistance resonates within Griffiths’ work: both share an understanding that bodies carry a unique, often unspoken language of resistance and the potential for transformation. We see in Griffiths’ work the proposition that typography might be understood as both an embodied practice and a discipline.

Griffiths’ installations encourage us not simply to look but to move around and through typographic forms, experiencing letters and sounds physically. Vowels and their abstractions take shape as tactile, spatial encounters, blurring distinctions between visual form and rhythm. In this way, Griffiths approaches typography as choreography, wherein sound is shaped into material presence. Her works share a capacity for political engagement, embodying resistance through inviting active participation – a dialogue of shapes, sounds and movements always open to new interpretations of bodily languages.

Ela Egidy, curator, May 2025

1 The quote is attributed to a number of people, including Laurie Anderson and Elvis Costello.

2 Alessandro Zambelli, in conversation with the author, 27 March 2025.

3 ibid.

4 Vilém Flusser, Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, Reaktion Books, London, 2013, p. 73.

5 Zhihua Duan & Catherine Griffiths, Catherine Griffiths: SOLO IN [ ] SPACE (a documentation), Pocca, Shanghai, 2021, p. 19.

6 Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism, PM Press, Oakland, 2020, p. 119.

7 Federici, p. 123.