- Venue
- The Royal Brompton Hospital, Sydney Street SW3 6NP
- Location
- London
Review by Emma Burdon
Breathing is ordinary. We do it without thinking all day, everyday, taking about sixteen breaths per minute. This adds up to around nine hundred and sixty breaths an hour; twenty-three thousand breaths in a day; and eight and a half million in a year. If we are lucky enough to reach the age of eighty we will take around seven hundred million breaths in our lifetime.
What’s remarkable about it, then, is that each of those sixteen breaths we take every minute is different from the next. This is something that has become apparent over the course of Jayne Wilton’s ongoing body of work; Breathe, which elegantly portrays the individual nature of every breath we take. It is an eclectic amalgamation of various process-led artworks, tied together by a common theme: an attempt to turn our everyday exhalations into something tangible and uniquely beautiful. Between etching breath onto copper plates, knitting medical journals into tactile floating balloons, and 3D rendering the shape of the word ‘happen’ as it is spoken into the air, ‘Breathe’ is a testament to Jayne’s capacity for creative innovation.
The Breathe project started when Jayne began a site-specific project during her Fine Art degree. Before turing her hand to art, Jayne’s background was in pharmaceuticals, specialising in working with people with asthma. When her local community began efforts to raise funds for a new hospice building, Jayne decided to get involved. Rather than the one-off site specific work that the Breathe project may have been, Jayne ended up embarking on a two-year involvement with the hospice, running monthly workshops with a variety of patients. Fascinated by how breath holds us to life, her work initially centred on breath: one of the first workshops was a sunflower (the hospice’s emblem) made out of candles, inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Flame of a Candle. After the success of this, she was increasingly called upon by popular demand to come up with new and exciting ways of visualising breath, resulting in the abundance of processes that are used in her work. The success of the Breathe project can partly be put down to how well it taps into a general fascination with making the invisible visible.
Her most recent work has been made in close collaboration with rb&hArts, based at Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals. The hospitals specialise in heart and lung care, and due to their specialist nature many of the patients require long-term care. The rh&hArts team provide valuable extra-medical care in the form of staff and patient art exhibitions, arts based events and activities and weekly music workshops. One such workshop is Singing for Breathing, which provides physiotherapeutic support for people with respiratory conditions. Through learning correct breathing techniques, members learn to utilise the full capacity of their lungs and release physical tension.
The outcome of this collaboration is an exhibition titled ‘Drawing Breath’, currently on show at the Royal Brompton Hospital. The exhibition is expertly curated by George Mogg, who shares Jayne’s fascination with capturing ephemerality through art. To create the work in this exhibition, Jayne worked with the Singing for Breathing groups at both hospitals. After presenting them with a portable, makeshift darkroom-tent, she asked them to crawl inside. Here they were asked to breathe, sing or sigh onto a piece of photographic film, leaving a signature of their breath behind.
The results are incredibly personal, and each breath is entirely different. One breath signature in particular stands out as one of the most distinctive pieces in the show – in hot reds and violently contrasting deep blues and greens, it evokes something insect-like, even alien. It belongs to a Singing for Breathing member who confessed to never having taken her health too seriously. Alarmed by the appearance of her breath, she exclaimed that she ‘better try to do something about it!’.
Although the project in collaboration with rb&hArts didn’t start out with any particular concerns about promoting health, it is fascinating to see this kind of affect emerge. It seems that sometimes just one image can drive home a point better than even the most well-chosen words. By visualising the ordinary act of breathing, Jayne has managed to create exceptionally personal artworks that are capable of having an unpredictable and extraordinary impact.
Breathe is open from 15 September-22 November 2014. The exhibition can be viewed daily from 9.00-5.00 at the Royal Brompton Hospital, Sydney Street, London SW3 6NP.
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