Welcome to my site. I hope you enjoy looking at my work. You will find installations, performances, music, live visuals, and many works that combine different art forms. I am based in Bristol, UK with a studio at BV Studios.

Biography

Kathy Hinde is an audiovisual artist inspired by behaviours and phenomena found in nature and the everyday expressed through audiovisual installations and performances that combine sound, sculpture, image and light. Composed of hand-made objects, electronics and a blend of digital and analogue systems, her work represents a cross between kinetic sound sculptures and newly invented instruments. She frequently works in collaboration with other practitioners and scientists and often actively involves the audience in the creative process.

She has toured work across Europe, USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, China, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Colombia, Australia and New Zealand. Awards include an Ivor Novello Award for Sound Art in 2020; an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in 2015; a British Composer Award in Sonic Art in 2017; an ORAM award in 2017 and a Scottish Award for New Music for collaboration with Maja Ratkje in 2018.  She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music by Bath Spa University in 2023, joined the Cryptic Artist programme in 2015, was a selected artist for European SHAPE Platform for innovative music and audiovisual art in 2018, is a member of Bristol Experimental Expanded Film collective (BEEF), and a resident at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol.

Artist Statement

My work grows from a partnership between nature and technology expressed through audio-visual installations and performances that combine sound, sculpture, image and light. I frequently work in collaboration with other practitioners and scientists and often actively involve the audience in the process. Drawing on inspiration from behaviours and phenomena found in the natural world, I create work that is generative; that evolves; that can be different each time it is experienced. 

My process often employs ‘open scores’ and chance procedures.  I compose carefully constructed frameworks from which the precise nature of sonic and visual events are changeable rather than fixed. When composing with open scores, I aim to define uncomplicated rules, from which a complex system of behaviours can emerge.  As nature adapts in response to its environment, my ‘open scores’ shape the behaviour and evolution of the music and visuals or sculpture.

I often create work in public spaces, including night-time walks with a series of installations positioned within a landscape. I aim to fully immerse the audience in a locative experience that can be intimate, and quiet, yet also expansive via the setting of a night time walk. I aim to give rise to a poetic and reflective experience that enriches an appreciation of the everyday, inviting a heightened awareness of the world around us, thus imbuing a refreshed sense of value with nature.

I often make installations that are a cross between kinetic sound sculptures and a newly invented musical instrument which can become a site for live performance and improvisation. I often re-purpose broken or unused instruments and research ways to incorporate low tech, low cost, hacked, or repurposed electronics into my installations, blending digital and analogue systems. I incorporate computer programming to generate non-repetitive structures. Systems, models, and data drawn from the natural world e.g. animal behaviours, biodiversity and dynamic ecosystems contribute to the material I work with. 

The height of my concern as an artist is humankind’s relationship with the environment, other species, each other and the earth’s systems. I am interested in the philosophical ideas of Ecosophy; a balance of mind, environment and society, and Deep Ecology; an environmental movement and philosophy which regards human life as just one of many equal components of a global ecosystem.

I aim to create work that generates an immersive and embodied experience to create space for imaginative thinking and reflection around environmental issues. I create openings in my practice for participation and direct engagement through social interaction often framed as listening walks.

“Just as species are disappearing at an alarming rate, whole areas of human thought, feeling and sensibility are becoming extinct through the power of an infantalising mass media and the social exclusion of the old, the young and the unemployed.”  Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies

“reconsider the human being as an ‘organism-in-its-environment’ rather than as an autonomous (discrete and ‘bounded’ ) being which faces an external environment composed of non-human elements” Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment.

“Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it’s own accord.”  John Cage

Header photo by Murdo Macleod