The Local Trust identified 150 communities across the UK as underserved and awarded each one £1m of Big Local funding to invest in improving the places where they live.

The Barnfield estate in Woolwich was one of them; a community with stories, character and ambition that rarely make it into any official account of what urban London looks and feels like. The brief was to spend time with the community and record some of those stories honestly, intimately and without telling people what to think about what they heard.

Sonic Portrait Production | Community Engagement | Arts-Led Research | Digital Storytelling

In one of his final projects before his death in November 2018, artist and photographer Tim Wainwright got to know the people of Barnfield, spending time on the estate, building trust, and recording intimate portrait conversations with residents as they spoke about their lives, their community and their place in it. Pete supported Tim with the development of the project and helped organise community screenings of the completed work, alongside a shared meal in the newly built community hub - a space the Barnfield community had funded with their Big Local grant after their old community centre was destroyed by fire.

Barnfield People represented a further evolution in Tim's sonic portrait methodology, moving from the silent film and voice recording approach of About Soul to still photography in-situ and voice recording, stripping away another layer of visual movement to focus attention even more completely on the voice of each participant and the meaning carried in their words.

The result is an intimate collection of portraits created with Blossom, Kevin, Remmy, Maria, Michelle, Tommy and many more, each one a complete world in a few minutes of listening.

Communities described as left-behind are rarely actually voiceless, they are simply not listened to. Barnfield People demonstrated, as Transplant and Life and About Soul had before it, that the sonic portrait creates a form of attention that is almost impossible to generate through conventional documentary or journalism: an audience that stops, looks at a face and listens, without narration, without agenda, without being told what to conclude.

This project was also the clearest expression of something Tim had been developing across his entire practice: the idea that removing elements (movement, music, narration, editing) rather than adding them, creates the conditions for a deeper and more honest encounter between a viewer and a person they have never met. The less the form does, the more the person can be heard.

Tim passed away in November 2018. Barnfield People is one of the last works he completed. The portraits remain available online, an enduring record of a community and a creative practice that deserves to be encountered by anyone who wants to understand what art can do when it chooses to listen rather than speak.

Client: Local Trust

TGA: Artist Support, Narrative Direction, Community Engagement, Events and Screenings

Partners: Tim Wainwright (Artist and Photographer)