Margaret Benyon

Margaret Benyon, , 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 services to art and has been called "the mother of British holography".

Education and early career

Margaret Benyon was born in Birmingham, England in 1940 and grew up in Kenya, where she attended The 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.

Career in holography

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.

From 1971 to 1973 was a Leverhulme Senior Art fellow in the Department of Architecture and Building Science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

Benyon spent the period between 1976 and 1981 in Australia.

Margaret Benyon earned a PhD from the Royal College of Art for a thesis entitled How is Holography Art? in 1994. She was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2000 "for services to art". Benyon has been called "the mother of British holography".

Margaret Benyon returned to Australia in 2005. She continued to practice as an artist, while teaching at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. She died on 21 October 2016.