Janey Hunt Trying to Live Sustainable Lifestyles

Living my life as enquiry, I am a socially engaged artist who makes lifeworks, that focus on the everyday processes of living and my own lifestyle and seeks to explore with other people our meanings of experience.

As an artist and researcher I am working in the field of climate change and environmental behaviour. My current work is exploring the tension between our recognition of the need, but then our inability to change our own behaviour (the value-action gap). Identifying myself as a well-intentioned green aspirant, and provoked by my own admissions of failure, I use conversation as both method and outcome, to encourage a sharing of experience and knowledge, frustration and achievement.

Generally operating outside of the gallery, in a commercial show, on the street, in my kitchen, on a list serv, or on a one-to-one basis, I engage people in conversation, which is used as both a medium and outcome. My work seeks to revalue individual experience and vernacular knowledge, a valuable resource, which I suggest is increasingly ignored and where the global market place cannot provide what we need to respond to climate change, it can only provide the means. That response needs to be based in individual behaviour change. So my art practice comprises a 3 stage process: A provocation for engagement comprising the examination of some aspect of my own behaviour; Designing a ‘situation’ to encourage conversation as the means of encouraging sharing knowledge and questioning of our own attitudes; Re-presenting conversation as a means of sharing knowledge and to enable others engagement and behaviour change.

By encouraging intimacy, my work is a shared learning process and allows the knowledge we have reached to invigorate one another. I understand ‘public’ as a pooled common knowledge, learned by hard experience, which unless it is revealed could die with the individual.

View my website http://www.escapelane.co.uk/