"My work often originates from natural effects: mountains or trees in the mist, shadows, movement of water, etcetera. I transpose these visual stimuli into various geometrical and arithmetical sequences of tone, colour, rotations, interval and shape, and refine tis until they seem right".
"Every work is filled with vibrancy, rhythm and a delight in the world. They seem to express a perfect synthesis of head, heart and eye.' Nigel Hall RA, 2023
Kathleen Hyndman was born on 12th January 1928 to parents Lilian and Douglas Blomfield in Brentwood, Essex. She grew up here, and in Dorking, where she became head girl at Dorking Grammar; and then trained at Kingston-upon-Thames School of Art. She was awarded a scholarship to the Slade but she turned it down stating she wanted to do “something useful for other people”, and instead studied teaching at the Institute of Education in London. Following the London County Council exam (in which she did very well), she took up a position at County Hall where she met her husband, Michael, who was to embark on his degree and teacher training at Oxford.
The Hyndmans, now with two young children, moved to Kingston Bagpuize in 1967, where Kathleen continued to paint as well as being a part-time art teacher in the local schools and the Further Education college. Throughout her life Kathleen always had moral and material support from her family which enabled her to foster and grow her way of depicting nature in mathematical sequences and geometrical patterns. She was fascinated by Golden Section proportions and angles, prime numbers as well as Fibonacci numbers and eccentric constructions, in order to create compositions that strove for calm and balanced unity. By doing so, she was able to develop one idea into a series of works in an attempt to search for the absolute ‘truth’. In 1977, Kathleen won the South Arts Bursary Arts Council Award and her work toured throughout that year in the South East with all the Art Council winners including at the Museums of Modern Art in Reading and Oxford.
In 1982, her work was selected for the Hayward Annual at the Hayward Gallery, and in 2000, she was awarded a Millennial Fellowship for her early work about the Isle of Dogs which she had created while a student at Kingston. It was published as a special narrative and observation of life in the post-Blitz docklands and she was given a solo exhibition, The Isle of Dogs, at The Space on the peninsula. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Kathleen exhibited both in the UK and internationally in group and solo shows. More recently, in early 2022, Zuleika Gallery presented Hyndman and Riley The Rhythm of Life; and in 2023, Professor Frances Spalding curated Kathleen Hyndman A Mathematical Artist and Her Lifelong Task at Clare Hall in Cambridge, a show dedicated to exploring her legacy and unique talent.