One of Australia’s most successful children’s authors, Andy Griffiths (b. 1961) has sold over 23 million books worldwide. In the 1980s Griffiths played in Melbourne punk bands like Gothic Farmyard before turning to teaching, where he made handmade books with his high school students. He became a full-time writer in 1992 and has since published over 40 bestselling books. Renowned for his fast-paced, irreverent writing style, Griffiths channels the transgressive humour and anything-goes ethos of punk into subversive stories that challenge expectations of what children’s literature should look like. Artist Ronnie van Hout is also a punk enthusiast, having fronted Aotearoa/New Zealand band Into the Void since the 1980s.
Van Hout’s multidisciplinary artistic practice is populated by sculptural doppelgangers. These warped self portraits are both uncanny and humorous, and pull apart ideas of the self, the ‘outsider’ and, in turn, our relationship to them as viewers. Approaching this commission, van Hout observed that Griffiths’ work also often functions as a self portrait: ‘You can see him in it, all the people he’s known are characters and the world he’s created is the world that he can do anything in’. Continuing van Hout’s longstanding use of body doubles, in Andy Andy the author appears in multiple; a standing Andy holds two tiny Andys in his hand to kaleidoscopic effect, while a fourth Andy gazes down at himself from a tree in a playful nod to the author’s Treehouse series. The sculpture is accompanied by a simply shot Super 8 film in which Griffiths stares down the barrel of the camera, engaged in a playful face off with the artist and, by extension, the audience.
Both Griffiths and van Hout draw on fictionalised versions of themselves in their work to populate creative worlds of their own making. In Andy Andy, these worlds collide in a space where weirdness is celebrated, the outsider takes centre stage and the boundaries between fact, fiction and self portrait dissolve.
Commissioned with funds provided by Tim Fairfax AC and the ICONS Syndicate 2026
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