Margaret Benyon
| Margaret Benyon | |
|---|---|
| Born | 29 April 1940 Birmingham, England |
| Died | 21 October 2016 (aged 76) |
| Education |
Slade School of Fine Art Royal College of Art |
| Known for | Pioneer in the artistic use of holography |
Margaret Benyon MBE was a British artist. Trained as a painter, she was one of the first artists to use holography as a medium and had her first solo show of holograms in 1969. She was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2000 for her service to art and has been called "the mother of British holography".
Margaret Benyon was born in Birmingham, England in 1940 and grew up in Kenya, where she attended Kenya High School. She studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, graduating in 1962. As a working artist in the early 1960s she sought to "question the abstract expressionists' assumption that the criterion of excellence in painting was that it should be treated as a flat surface". She employed techniques including "optical illusions, colour and so on", particularly the moiré pattern, "to modulate the picture plane so that it no longer looked flat". She also created anaglyph paintings, which appeared three dimensional when viewed through special glasses with differently coloured lenses.
Benyon became interested in holography after reading a newspaper article about it in 1967. From 1968 to 1971 she held a fellowship in fine art at the University of Nottingham, where she began experimenting with holography as an artistic medium. Building on her already existing knowledge of photographic processing techniques, she taught herself holography by reading scientific journal articles. She was given after-hours use of a laboratory in the university's mechanical engineering department, where she made her first holograms.
In 1969 the University of Nottingham art gallery displayed Benyon's holograms in what has been called the world's "first solo art holography show". She made the holograms for the show in a laboratory of the British Aircraft Corporation in Bristol, England. She later made use of the facilities at the National Physical Laboratory. In February and March 1970 Benyon had a solo show at the Lisson Gallery in London. The exhibition poster described it as the "first London expo of holograms and stereoscopic paintings".
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