Demonstrations of Patterns in Flow is a sequence of images and text obliquely meditating on balance, failure, practise and play. Comprising photographs of gymnasium floors after a flatland BMX competition, and an essay, What Do you Expect From Your Surfaces, this artists’ book uses the subject matter of BMX, and the geometric traces it leaves, as an idiosyncratic approach to questions of creativity and order.

Demonstrations of Patterns in Flow continues Griffin’s interest in the impulse to collect and typologise through photography, and ultimately the slippages and frictions that occur through this desire for rigidity. This unique artists’ book is hand-made, with each edition printed in a way to create a completely random and unique sequence of images in each copy. The arbitrary pairing of texts and geometric forms folds into Griffin’s mythologising of the chance nature of flatland. For Griffin, BMX is a dream-space in which there are no rules or restrictions but that of imagination and gravity; a ‘heaven on earth that you can lose yourself within for a couple of hours, in order to escape the purgatory that we call this dogmatic society’.

This book accompanies Griffin's exhibition of the same title at Hannah Barry, 05 May – 03 June 2017.

Oliver Griffin (1983, Boscome, UK) is an artist working with the tensions between photography and the typological. Griffin produces archives of the everyday to be examined and referenced, attempting to subvert perceptions of our ordinary surroundings. Oliver is represented by Hannah Barry in the UK and Dzialdov in Germany. He is also a member of ABC Artists' Books Co-operative and runs Bordom & Theory, a publishing project.