“At first sight, it’s three rooms of large format portrait photographs — no cables or speakers anywhere in view. But there is sound everywhere: a shifting audio environment of high-tech hospital machinery, the ominous panting of a pump. Then suddenly a picture speaks to you. This is a cool, spacious show. It’s as if the artists’ very lack of agenda has opened up a space in which the viewer can hear the patients’ voices and think calmly.”
Clive Bell, The Wire Magazine
The Transplant installation comprises 24 large-scale, custom-made ‘flat speakers’ that are also high-resolution photographs by Tim Wainwright. Developed during our year-long residency at Harefield Hospital—a world-leading centre for heart and lung transplantation—the work emerged from engaging deeply with patients and staff, documenting both the individuals and the clinical environment through photography and sound.
The work is an intricate multi-channel composition that provides a separate channel of audio for each photograph. This truly ‘immersive’ environment leads visitors to explore the space and the photographs, experiencing the piece from shifting listening perspectives. The audio weaves together environmental sounds and voices, moving subtly between field recording and music created using the materials of the recordings themselves.
“The presence of mortality frames the fractured narrative of Wynne’s 24-channel mix of candid monologues and ambient noise. He amplifies the rhythms of the ward, almost as invasive as the surgery, and hints that the hallucinations which often accompany intensive treatment are as much the result of information overload as of drugs. That most powerful of stimulants, hope, arises from the cacophony as a muffled sob. In this unit, you might overdose on expectation.”
Ed Baxter, The Guardian
“Vanishing into illness and transformation (either through transplant or death, or a vanishing into the medical environment) is a central issue of the work: the sound work, the voices, the photographs. 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
