// Barnfield People

Project: Revealing the lived experiences of residents in one of the UK’s “left behind” communities

Client: Local Trust

Partners: Tim Wainwright (1954-2018)

Start: Big Local identified 150 communities across the UK and “left behind” and granted them each £1m to invest in improving the places where they live.

In one of his final projects, artist and photographer, Tim Wainwright (1954-2018), got to know the people of the Barnfield Big Local area in Greenwich, and recorded them as they spoke about their lives and their estate.

Journey: Peter assisted Tim with the development of the project, and to put on a community screening of the completed work and a meal in the new community hub – a space that the community used the Big Local funding to pay for after their old community centre was destroyed by fire

Barnfield People represented another evolution in Tim’s process, creating powerful audio-visual portraits, from the silent film + voice recording approach used in About Soul, to still images + voice recording.

The impact of this approach sought to further remove distraction, in the form of movement in this case, enabling the viewer to focus even more on the voice of the participants and draw meaning from the words that are being said

Destination:

This intimate collection of conversations and portraits provides an insight into the vibrancy, warmth and complexity of one of London’s many ‘left behind’ communities, and how residents are coming together to forge a different and more hopeful future

Working with Tim revealed new ways of layering engagement and connectivity into our creative approach, projects like this, as well as Transplant and Life UK, About Soul, and Moments of Care also clearly show the power of art to create space for people to speak and listen in new ways

You can view all of Tim’s sonic portraits for Barnfield People, here