John Wynne’s practice spans installations, sculptural works, and "composed documentaries" exploring the borders of ethnography and abstraction. His Installation for 300 speakers, Pianola and vacuum cleaner was the first sound art acquired by the Saatchi Gallery, drawing nearly 500,000 visitors to its 2010 summer show. In his site-specific installations and projects with speakers of endangered languages or medical patients, Wynne’s work prompts a "critical shift from apparent mimesis to a subtly unfolded artifice... pointing to the singular, changing engagement with sound that occurs at different times for different listeners." (Daniela Cascella)
John is Emeritus Professor of Sound Art at University of the Arts London and holds a PhD from the University of London. He lives and works between London and British Columbia.
The Organ Recital is a multichannel video and sound installation based on the artist's own CT scan. It was developed during a residency at EMS Stockholm and in situ at Cable Depot in London in 2024.
and quiet that splinters the winter is a site-specific installation created during a collaborative residency with Denise Hawrysio in At Home Gallery in Slovakia in September/October 2023.
People I wouldn't have known was commissioned by the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, and the installation was part of their Life Eternal exhibition in 2022-23.
On Something is a series of 12 looping videos produced as part of the Web Exhibition programme at MOCA London. It was produced during Covid times (2021) through a month of studio experimentation exploring the interaction of sound, images, objects, and text in a three-dimensional space.
Cats and Dogs is an online performance for violin and video developed for MOCA London during the first Covid-19 lockdown in London. The Zoom audience's window on the video footage shot by Denise Hawrysio was controlled in real time by John's violin. The piece was later performed for Gazelli Art House London and a recorded version shown in the 2020 Strangelove Film Festival in the UK.
I am the gigantic baobab is a collaborative film made with artist Sara Davidmann and young members of the LGBTQ+ community in Botswana. In 2020 it was selected for the Strangelove Festival in Folkestone and the Leeds Queer Film Festival.
Birds I wouldn't have heard conveys the impact of serious illness and organ transplantation on the daily lives and identity of recipients, live donors and those on the waiting list. This multichannel sound, photography and video installation was exhibited as part of the Spare Parts season at Science Gallery London in 2019.
Transplant and Life was a major exhibition of John's collaborative work with photographer Tim Wainwright at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons, London. Based on the experiences of kidney, liver, pancreas, heart and lung transplant recipients and live donors, it consisted of 3 installations and ran for 6 months to May 2017.
Grave is a sculptural installation using multiple feedback loops which showed at Gazelli Art House, London, in 2015 and at the Wexford Arts Centre in Ireland in 2017.
This untitled solo exhibition in 2015 was the culmination of a research residency in the Atrium Gallery at Bournemouth University, UK. It makes use of an almost 40 year old Atari computer with 1MB of RAM and no hard drive to explore relationships between drawing, architecture and sound.
I Am Not the Cancer is a video and sound installation based on women with advanced (metastatic) breast cancer. Developed in collaboration with photographer Tim Wainwright, different versions of the piece were shown in 10 cities from 2013-15, including London, Athens, Brussels, Nicosia, Basel and Dubai.
Nocturnal, a collaboration with filmmaker Atom Egoyan, was commissioned in 2013 for Faster Than Sound by Jonathan Reekie, director of the Snape Maltings arts and music centre in the UK. It was a site-specific installation developed in a former kiln using video projection, a bespoke camera obscura, and 17 channels of sound.
Installation no 3 for high and low frequencies (2014) This site-specific installation at Gazelli Art House, London, was the third in an ongoing series of works using only very high and very low frequency sound. See also installations 1 and 2 below.
Installation no 2 for high and low frequencies (2012) “The critical shift in this installation is from apparent mimesis to a subtly unfolded artifice: permeable and open, prompting hesitation, the space created by Wynne does not display the purity of acoustic phenomena but points to the singular, changing engagement with sound that occurs at different times for different listeners.” (Daniela Cascella, Frieze)
Installation no 1 for high and low frequencies (2011) “The meeting of the low frequencies creates a sort of third volume around head height, a kind of churning volume, that is very interesting. The high frequency reverberations really delineate the space – you can feel the architecture from their movement and the way they bounce around.” (David Toop)
Anspayaxw (2010-15) is a large-scale installation based on speakers of Gitxsanimaax, an endangered indigenous language in British Columbia, Canada. It has shown twice at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, as well as at the 'Ksan Cultural Centre in Gitxsan territory and for the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco. The project is the subject of book chapters in Playing with Words and Between Art and Anthropology.
Installation for 300 speakers, Pianola and vacuum cleaner (2009/10) This work of “monumental minimalism” (Farquhar) or “minimal monumentalism” (Finer), was developed during an AHRC-funded residency at Beaconsfield Gallery. It subsequently became the first piece of sound art in the Saatchi collection. Brandon Labelle writes that the work “creates a soft balance between order and chaos, organization and its rupture”.
230 Unwanted Speakers was the second in a series of 3 major installations using discarded hi-fi speakers. Subtitled Walnut Grained Vinyl Veneered Particleboard Construction), it was commissioned by Hull Art Lab in the UK in 2013.
Fallender ton für 207 lautsprecher boxen was John's first work for reclaimed speakers. Produced during a 2004 residency at Kunstfabrik, Berlin, one visitor wrote that it “sounded like heaven ... and hell.”
What is What (2013) is a collaborative installation with Denise Hawrysio. Combining one of Wynne's early durational audio pieces with Hawrsyio's video of holding ice in her hand, the work was made for Frise Künstlerhaus in Hamburg.
Andromache, a contemporary adaptation of Racine by Graham McClaren for Necessary Angel and Luminato in Toronto. Wynne was nominated for a 2011 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Sound Design and Composition.
Beating Tones and Flapping Wings was a site-specific installation commissioned for the 2010 Cut & Splice Festival in London, using 40 recycled boom boxes, two radio transmitters and two flying radios.
Hearing Loss (2007-11), and its later iteration, Cold Atlantic (2013), are small sculptural installations making use of the feedback produced by the 6 hearing aids left behind by the artist's father when he died.
Hearing Voices (2004/5) is a body of work based on highly endangered 'click languages' spoken by the indigenous Khoi and San peoples in the Kalahari Desert. The installation has shown at the Botswana National Museum, the National Art Gallery of Namibia, the Brunei Gallery at SOAS and P3 Gallery in London. A half hour radio piece commissioned by the BBC won the Silver Award at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago.
Wireframe is an architectural sound drawing commissioned by the Surrey Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2009. It is part of an ongoing project of what could be described as architectural sound drawings which began with an immersive, site-specific 16.1 channel installation in London. The concept was developed during a residency at E:vent Gallery, where Sound CAD was exhibited. (2006/09/14)
The Transplant project (2008-16) began with a year-long artist residency at one of the world's leading centres for heart and lung transplantation. Working with photographer Tim Wainwright, John recorded patients, the devices they were attached to or had implanted in them, and the hospital environment. “Both dignified and brutal, the Transplant installation evokes the melancholy and trauma that underpin this uncanny transaction.” (The Guardian)
Do(n’t) began as an interactive installation in Barcelona in 2002, part of John’s research into auditory warnings (alarm sounds), which began with The Sound of Sirens (see below). It subsequently became a set of three text/sound pieces for the online journal Static in 2007, which were subsequently played on the BBC’s Big Screen in a public square in Hull, UK, in 2007.
Response Time (2002/05), a large-scale, site-specific octaphonic installation in the urban park at Toronto's Metro Hall. Despite being part of Wynne's exploration of auditory warnings, the piece was described by one critic as “an ambient, ghost-like presence”.
Cry Wolf, composed with bespoke alarm sounds designed by Wynne using FM Synthesis, was diffused across 25 computer-controlled speakers installed in a vertical grid against the 4-storey central wall of Kiasma, Helsinki's Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001.
The Sound of Sirens (1997) was commissioned by the Sound/Gallery in Copenhagen. It made use of the gallery's permanent installation of a grid of 25 speakers hidden under the paving stones covering an area of 900 square metres. Wynne's piece was banned by the City Council of Copenhagen for allegedly frightening and confusing the public.
Grasping and Clinging (2000) is a collaboration with Denise Hawrysio in Bangkok, Thailand, for which John designed small interactive audio devices that blended with the infrastructure of the gallery.
Horisontista Horisonttiin (2000-01) is an audio piece made specifically for an art installation on a working tram in the city of Helsinki, Finland.
Upcountry (1999) began as a sonic portrait of Kenyan master musician William Ingosi Mwoshi. The piece premiered in the Purcell Room in London and has been widely broadcast, including on Radiotopia Kunstradio.
James Kamotho Kimani was selected by the International Society for Contemporary Music and played in the cavernous Tycho Brahe Planetarium in Copenhagen in 1996. It was released on CD by Unknown Public and broadcast in Berlin, London, Toronto and San Francisco.
I've been everywhere was commissioned in 2021 by the SONS (Shoes Or No Shoes) Museum in Belgium. This sculptural piece was made with from mud collected on a marshland path frequented by Charles Dickens on the Thames Estuary in Kent.
Relaxation and Nothingness is a video by Denise Hawrysio with a soundtrack by Wynne. It evolved from a live Zoom intervention made for MOCA London in April 2020.
Ukraine Study was made for a Book Art Salon in London in 2019. It uses projection mapping and interactive sound techniques with video and sound recorded in Ukraine and violin played by Evie Hilyer Zeigler.
HPNoSS (Hosptial Project on Noise, Sound and Sleep) was an interdisciplinary research project on which John was lead researcher. The aim was to seek an holistic understanding of sound in the hospital environment and the intimate relationship of noise to sleep, rest, treatment and recovery.
Faster Higher Stronger (2009/12) is a 5-channel flat speaker installation which makes use of publicly visible graphic subversions of the Olympic rings gathered from various sources.
Push comes to Shove is a video/sound installation in collaboration with Denise Hawrysio which premiered at Fieldgate Gallery in London in 2007.
Feeding the Habit of Energy is an audio piece designed as a sound walk along the canals of Loughborough, UK, commissioned by RADAR in 2007. It is a meditation on the sonic environment of the huge Brush generator factory which sprawls next to the city's train station. It has been played on Framework (Resonance FM, London) and on hr2 in Germany.
Shovel is one of a series of 1980s films by Denise Hawrysio created by attaching a Super-8 camera to various machines and tools. The unedited soundtrack is from a cassette Wynne bought lfor 25¢ from a New York street vendor in the 80s, though it wasn't joined to the previously silent film until it was digitised in 2003.
Asphalt Cooker is another of Denise Hawrysio's Super-8 films from the 80s. Her camera assumes an “impossible point of view [and] we have no reliable clues to guide our reading” (Nicky Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena), yet it still successfully captures a raw choreography of manual labour. The soundtrack — police radio intercepted by Wynne — was recorded in the South London squat the artists shared in 1984.
329 Main Street was shot in 1985 by Denise Hawrysio in her father’s house in Woodstock, Ontario, during a period of his declining health. The soundtrack, added in 2002, is taken from Panic and Depression, an electroacoustic composition for violin and tape composed by Wynne in the early 1990s, with Aleks Kolkowski on violin.
Interactive Plastic Carrier Bags is an installation exhibited in 2004 at Goldsmiths College, University of London, during John's time there as a PhD candidate.
John's work for film and TV includes soundtracks for films selected for the London Film Festival, the BBC Short Film Festival, the Whitechapel Open, the Rotterdam Film Festival and the European Media Art Festival, as well as for the documentary The Trial of Freedom, which aired on Channel 4 in the UK and on CTV in Canada. He has done film voiceovers for Ben Rivers' Slow Action and Saskia Olde Wolbers' Trailer.