Transplant

Collaborative project with the late Tim Wainwright (1954-2018)
See links below for details on each output...

Transplant - 24-channel installation
Transplant - book and DVD
Transplant - video installation
ITU - video with surround sound
Flow-
7-screen video and sound installation
Hearts, Lungs and Minds- for BBC Radio 3

Part and Parcel - 8-channel audio work

The Transplant Log - a web log kept by the artists during their residency at Harefield Hospital


John Wynne

 

 

Transplant, a long-term collaborative project with photographer Tim Wainwright, explores territory on the borders of art and anthropology, extending the sensory turn in ethnography in the direction of sound and investigating new relationships between sound and still image. Continuing Wynne’s pursuit of socially engaged sound arts practice and multi-channel installation, it began with a year-long residency at Harefield Hospital, a world-leading centre for heart and lung transplantation. The artists recorded and photographed patients, the devices they were attached to or had implanted, and the hospital environment, researching and developing ideas leading to multiple outcomes. Primary among these are a 24-channel sound/photography installation in which the photographs are the actual source of the sound, and a published book of essays and interviews containing a DVD.

Other outputs include a surround sound video (ITU, shown in UK, Ireland, Germany, Canada), an award-winning half-hour composed documentary (Hearts, Lungs and Minds, for BBC Radio 3), a multi-channel video/sound installation (Flow, at the Old Operating Theatre in London), and an 8-channel sound work (Part and Parcel, Kettles Yard and the Whitworth Art Gallery).

 

 

 

 

 


In various ways, heart and lung transplants blur the easy distinctions between life and death, between being alive and not. The transplant unit at Harefield is a place where all these issues cross, where dying and living has a different and more elastic meaning than in the world outside.

Charles Darwent

(Art critic, Independent on Sunday)


Wainwright and Wynne pick their way across a minefield of colossal emotions, hallucinatory experiences and cutting edge medical technology with great tenderness and delicacy.

Clive Bell

(The Wire Magazine)


Through all the differences and similarities of sound and vision, seeing and hearing, looking and listening, a rapprochement emerges in the collaboration. The insistent stillness of a photograph hovers in and out of the temporal movement of spoken language, but both add a powerful sense of human presence and individuality to each other.

David Toop

The work is supercharged with affect. Understated rather than sentimental, it evokes a sense of quiet dread, of mortality and frailty; the visceral, bodily sensation of illness, death hovering close by; but also hope, hanging on by the fingernails, the miracles of medical science, of new life.
Michael Gallagher
(Field Recording and the Sounding of Spaces)



 

 

 

Video from the Transplant publication (see link at top of page)

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Reviews



Interview with the artists



BBC News feature



The Transplant project was funded by Arts Council England and managed by Victoria Hume at rb&hArts. The installation and book received support, either financially or in-kind, from Amina Technologies, The Derek Butler Trust, Harefield Hospital Charitable Fund, the John Lewis Partnership, Metro Imaging, Re-Beat, To Transplant and Beyond and University of the Arts London. No NHS money or resources were used for this project.