About

Cathy Haynes is a writer, curator, artist and educator based in London. Her first book, The Fullness of Time: Marking the Day by Birdsong, Blooms, Shadows and Stars, will be published in the UK by Bloomsbury on 12 March 2026 and in North America by Riverhead (Penguin Random House) on 21 April 2026. As an author, she is represented by Rowan Lawton at The Soho Agency.

Cathy has been researching, writing, and developing a creative practice on aspects of time for more than two decades.

As artist in residence in Victoria Park for Chisenhale Gallery in 2014, for example, Cathy made Stereochron Island, a playful research project that imagined the park was a tiny island territory campaigning to become a state without clocks. At its heart was a series of exploratory walks and workshops with the ‘islanders’ (park visitors) led in collaboration with ecologists, an astronomer and a musician. The Stereochron Island ‘campaign’ was focused on seeking and experiencing richer, more varied and multi-sensory signs of time. In significant ways, the project sowed the seeds for The Fullness of Time.

In 2013, as Timekeeper in residence at UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, Cathy led a multi-disciplinary AHRC-funded research project in collaboration with scholars from ancient history, archaeology, architecture, materials science, philosophy and psychology, students and members of the public. The project began with a programme of multi-disciplinary conversations and workshops. It culminated in an exhibition, A Storm is Blowing, exploring the cultural history of how we picture the shape and direction of time, from a many-horned goat to the Facebook ‘Timeline’. The project created a model of engagement that has since been adopted widely across UCL culture.

In her broader work, Cathy has been Head of Academy at Scriberia, a founding faculty member at The School of Life, London, and Curator for Art on the Underground (Transport for London). As Head of Interaction at Artangel in the early 2000s, she devised and co-commissioned Nights of London. This pioneering programme of projects led by artists and writers explored the nocturnal city with people who wake, work or watch over it while the rest of us sleep.

From 2004 to 2009, Cathy created Implicasphere with Sally O’Reilly. The final five issues of this series of mini-publications were inserted in Cabinet magazine. She has also written for the Guardian, and been a guest contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Digital Human and Human Zoo programmes and Monocle 24 Radio’s Weekly show.

Cathy has given guest lectures, talks and workshops for many cultural and academic organisations, including the British Council/UCL Museum Training School, D&AD (President’s Lecture series), the Royal College of Art’s MA in Curating Contemporary Art, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and How the Light Gets In philosophy festival in Hay-on-Wye.

Cathy holds an MA (dist.) in Media and Communications (1997) from Goldsmiths University of London, and a BA (1st Class) in Social and Political Sciences (1995) from Cambridge University.

Photo: Rhys Frampton, 2025