Cathy Haynes makes research-led projects, often in collaboration with experts from other fields and members of the public. Her means of enquiry range from essays and drawing studies to archival installations, workshops, lectures, radio broadcasts and performances.
Cathy’s work explores tools and models we use to make sense of the world and in whose image the world is shaped. Her map projects have looked at how historically specific ideas – such as Progress or Nationhood – are rendered into everyday objects that give them a palpable feeling of immediate truth. Cathy also has a particular interest in how our dependency on the clock narrows our experience and understanding of time.
The broad hope behind Cathy’s work is to expose threads of fiction and faith that hold ‘universal truths’ together, and to playfully experiment with alternative models. Her aim, too, is to help dismantle the divisions between fields of knowledge that limit our sense of permission to explore, question and take part.
For a list of selected artist projects and exhibitions, see below. The posts on the home page present several of these projects in detail.
Selected solo projects
* Stereochron Island, an offsite project as Chisenhale Gallery’s artist in residence in Victoria Park, London, reimagining the park as a tiny territory campaigning to become a State Without Clocks (2014)
* A Storm is Blowing, an AHRC-supported research project, event programme and installation as Timekeeper in residence, UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London (2013)
* How to Map a Life, an exhibition documenting the collective experiment performed at the Rietveld Academie (below), Rongwrong Gallery, Amsterdam (2012)
* On Trying to Map a Life, a lecture and collective experiment for Alfredo Cramerotti’s programme alongside Sally O’Reilly, Fay Nicholson and Tai Shani in Studium Generale: We Are The Time, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (2012)
* No Such Place, a research project and exhibition on fictions in official maps commissioned by Alfredo Cramerotti for the unofficial display spaces of QUAD, Derby (2010)
* Implicasphere, a serial mini-publication co-edited with Sally O’Reilly, distributed inside Cabinet magazine (2006-09)
Selected group exhibitions
* ‘One degree of the Earth’s turn’, a contribution to the Long Time Enquiry, UK (2018)
* The inaugural address (solo) for Jem Finer’s Longplayer Day, Artangel/Goldsmiths University of London (2017)
* Overlay, with Nancy Holt, Hannah Lees, Zoë Paul and Claire Potter, curated by Jeremy Millar, White Rainbow, London (2016)
* Tenderpixel at Art Rotterdam, with Erika Hock, Fay Nicolson and Ilona Sagar (2015)
* Tomb, Shrine, Survey-Marker, Spare-Part, with Sam Austen, Ben Cove, Karen David, Lawrence Lek and Superlative TV, curated by Lucy A Sames, Enclave, London (2014)
* before breakfast we talked about the furthest visible point before it all disappeared, with Fay Nicolson, Kentaro Yamada, Andrea Zucchini and The School of the Event Horizon, Tenderpixel, London (2014)
* Chronovisor: Archive, with Johann Arens, Verity Birt, Rowena Harris, Patrick Hough and Mirko Smerdel, South Kiosk, London (2014)
Image: Cathy Haynes, Making Progress, 2013
Cathy Haynes 