John Wynne is an artist whose research-led practice encompasses large-scale installations, site-specific sound sculptures, and award-winning “composed documentaries”. His work navigates the fluid boundaries between ethnography and abstraction, consistently informed by a primary focus on sound and the act of listening. Whether working with endangered languages, medical environments, or architectural space, his practice is rooted in the tension between the material quality of sound and its ability to carry complex social and cultural histories.

John obtained his PhD in Sound Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and was a core member of the CRISAP research centre at the University of the Arts London, where he taught for 21 years. Now Emeritus Professor of Sound Art, he has been re-orienting his practice as an independent artist, integrating socio-political concerns with a rigorous phenomenological focus. While his recent work has incorporated video projection, he approaches the visual medium as inextricably linked to the sonic environment. For Wynne, sound articulates space by rendering it in the temporal realm; similarly, he utilises visual content such as projection mapping to proliferate beyond the traditional frame, creating a fertile resonance with the medium of sound. This process is intended not as spectacle, but as a sustained exploration of three-dimensional space and architectural acoustics.

His most recent works include and quiet that splinters the winter (2023), a site-specific collaboration with Denise Hawrysio based on the war in Ukraine, and The Organ Recital (2024), a multi-channel video and sound installation. The latter translates a CT scan of the artist's own body into an anatomical self-portrait. Both projects use high and low frequency sounds — both as a way to explore the subjective experience of architectural space and as a way of directly affecting the body of the listener through sounds that are more felt than heard. Continuing an interest in extreme frequencies that began with his series Installation for High and Low Frequencies (nos. 1, 2 and 3) — described in Frieze as “complex blocks of raw vibrational forces” — these later works shift from using purely synthetic high frequencies to sounds derived from his own violin playing. This shift humanises the work; in the Ukraine piece, it resonates with recordings of soldier-violinists, while in The Organ Recital it anchors the imagery as a form of self-representation. These projects utilise visual mapping as a means of extending a complex dialogue with site-specific sound composition.

A significant strand of Wynne's practice involves long-term, research-based projects. This includes extensive work in collaboration with linguists and speakers of endangered indigenous languages, such as the Khoi and San click languages in the Kalahari Desert and Gitxsanimaax in Canada. These projects resulted in the internationally exhibited installations Hearing Voices — which showed at the Botswana National Museum, the National Art Gallery of Namibia, and SOAS in London — and Anspayaxw, which had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver and for the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco. Hearing Voices also included a half-hour commission for BBC Radio 3 which won the Silver Award at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago.

Wynne’s investigation into medical environments and the elastic meaning of mortality has led to major projects exploring the borders of art and anthropology. Alongside photographer Tim Wainwright, he undertook long-term residencies at world-leading organ transplant centres, producing Transplant — a book and 24-channel installation — and Transplant and Life, a major exhibition at the Hunterian Museum in London described by The Lancet as “thoughtful and especially welcome”. His project I Am Not the Cancer, a multi-channel sound and video installation based on the recorded voices of women with metastatic breast cancer, showed in nine European capitals and Dubai, including exhibitions at the Famagusta Gate in Nicosia and the European Parliament in Brussels.

Parallel to his ethnographic work is an ongoing investigation into architectural acoustics and the contingencies of listening. This includes site-specific explorations such as Wireframe, developed for the Surrey Art Gallery in Vancouver, which uses multi-channel sound in total darkness to draw a time-based 3D representation of architectural space.

In 2010, his Installation for 300 speakers, Pianola and vacuum cleaner became the first piece of sound art to enter the Saatchi collection. This monumental work, which served as the centrepiece of the gallery’s summer show, utilises obsolescent technology to investigate the sculptural and perceptual qualities of sound in the gallery space. By orchestrating a massive array of second-hand speakers to play a composition that is at once fragile and complex, the piece challenges the listener’s perception of volume, scale, and the physical presence of sound.