In this podcast by the Life of Breath Project, visual artist Jayne Wilton talks about how she came to work with breathing in her artistic practice.
When she first gave workshops for patients in a hospice, Jayne Wilton discovered that the patients enjoyed experimenting with their breathing and she asked herself “what can visual art add to that?” She came up with various creative ways to record breathing and to translate the relationship “we all have with our breath in terms of how it feels viscerally to us” into art.
The featured image, called ‘Sing’, depicts traces of patients in the Royal Brompton Hospital “breathing through a light source onto photographic film” while singing. Their song is transformed into splashes of blue onto turquoise aluminium prints. “My work is mostly about the presence of breath, recording and registering breath … and so thinking about the presence of breath in the same way as when you’re drawing and you try to draw negative spaces to render the positive object, it seemed obvious to then look at the absence of breath in relation to the presence of breath.” she says in the interview with producer Sarah McClusky. The podcast also features other artists who share Jayne Wilton’s fascination with the breath, including Piero Manzoni, Mark Wallinger and Francis Bacon.