This 8-channel audio composition, the title of which comes from nurse Sherrie Panther’s words (below), differs from the main body of work in the Transplant project in that its sole focus is on the experience of both patients and staff in relation to sound and hearing in the hospital environment. The compositional approach is similar, in that it weaves voices with the field recordings I made in and around the transplant ward and Intensive Treatment Unit (ITU) at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading centres for heart and lung transplantation. It is, like the radio works Hearts, Lungs and Minds and Hearing Voices, an example of what producer Alan Hall has described as ‘composed documentary’.
“This vanishing, into illness and transformation (either through transplant or death, or a vanishing into the medical environment) is a central issue of John Wynne and Tim Wainwright’s Transplant project: the sound work, the voices, the photographs. In John Wynne’s sound piece – Part and Parcel – an immersive spatialised field of whirring and bleeping, crashing and humming, disembodied distant voices and near-field speech – is created from the audio material he has collected in Harefield Hospital. The disorientating impression of envelopment in a confused web of sound is very strong, but this is repeatedly pulled back to specifics by recordings of the patients themselves. Feelings of fragility are pervasive and clearly audible in these bedside recordings: every tremor and lapse; the halting and wheezing of breath; the breaks in which speech is overwhelmed by tears; the pain of what is said; the grain of how it is said.”
David Toop, ‘Depths and Clamour; Inside and Outside’ in Transplant
8.1 channel speaker set up for Part and Parcel at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
“I think nurses become very familiar to sound – like ringing of bells – that becomes part and parcel. A bit like VADs [ventricular assist devices], when they’re actually making the noise, and the ringing and the buzzing in the background – it’s quite comforting in a sense, because you know the patient’s alive. Or there’s a tone, which can be a red tone, which means that there’s actually an emergency occurring. So, noise and sound is very important for nurses in terms of working with, communicating with, patients. And it’s also kind of like a touch-base situation with patients wanting nurses. So bells and buzzers are parts and parcels of nursing, you know. And sometimes you go home and you hear a familiar sound and you think, ‘Oh it’s a patient buzzing,’ but actually it’s actually an alarm clock, or an alarm gone off outside which sounds just like the patients buzzing for a nurse. And I think, when you’re in complete quiet, a nurse actually becomes worried, because silence is not part and parcel of nursing. Because silence equates to patients not talking, or not being alive even. So it’s a big part, noise.”
Sherrie Panther, Modern Matron, Harefield Hospital