Sally Colahan Griffin has a career in the visual arts, primarily painting and sometimes photography.

In style and philosophy, she is closest to the non-traditional realism school of painting and believes it is with a fusion of historical and currents events, with memory and experience, that a ‘new realism’ can be made.

As a daughter of an artistic mother and architect father and born in Melbourne, Sally Griffin’s early art was influenced by late century modernism and the change decades of the 1960s and seventies. Living in a home designed along modernist principles, essentially a glass box on stilts, open plan design and surrounded by tall trees, her childhood had a creative and bohemian tempo.

Griffin, from a very early age, was covering the long laminated bar at home, which acted as a room divider between kitchen and lounge, with drawings. Sometimes they were ajaxed off, sometimes they survived a few days, and on this surface, she had her first lessons in drawing.

Based in the city, Griffin went to the Melbourne State College from 1970 for four years, majoring in painting, drawing and philosophy of art. She came to New Zealand for a summer holiday in the 1974.  By 1976, she was still in New Zealand, living in Devonport, and working as a news photographer. She had a large factory-studio and it was here that she had the time to concentrate on lead and chalk pastel drawings as well as working on a vocabulary of images from her new experiences in New Zealand-Aotearoa.

Griffin exhibited regularly from 1978 till 1994. Her first exhibition was a series of 'life-size' drawings in pencil and chalk at the Little Theatre at Auckland University. They all sold. After that, she was represented by Denis Cohn in Auckland from 1979 - 1990 and had many shows during those years. She was awarded Queen Elizabeth 2 Arts Council grants in 1983, 1984, 1989 and 1990 and showed in group touring exhibitions. One of the grants sponsored Griffin to participate in an internationalist mural project in downtown New York with the New Zealand contingent comprising of herself, Fatu Feu’u, John Walsh and Para Matchitt. This mural no longer exists.

She was  also exploring mural painting as a way of painting large surfaces with a storytelling art. She started painting large scale murals in 1981 and has continued with murals on assignment alongside an art practice that embraces creativity rather than being market forces led.