Transplant

Collaborative project with the late Tim Wainwright

Installation Book & DVD Video installation Radio piece

ITU: video Flow: installation Part & Parcel: sound

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. The DVD contains a video which was used for installations in the UK, Germany, Australia and Canada.

Other outputs include an award-winning half-hour composed documentary for radio (Hearts, Lungs and Minds, for BBC Radio 3), a surround sound video (ITU, shown in UK, Ireland, Germany, Canada), 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, 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

“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 & the sounding of spaces

During the residency, the artists posted images and sounds as a kind of web log:

The Transplant Log

Reviews

The Times

The Guardian

The Wire