Janenne Willis (she/her) is an mutlidisciplinary artist and writer who explores deep listening as both artistic methodology and a way of reimagining and remembering relationships between humans, place and the more-than-human world.
Her practice tends to empathy, grief, belonging and awe in collaboration with tides, weather, water and Country. This dialogue is expressed across writing, sound, installation, performance, photography, public practice, collective ritual and artist-led initiatives.
Based on Bunurong and Boonwurrung Country on the shores of Wurnmarrinh in Australia, with projects that extend internationally, Janenne develops long-term bodies of work. Ongoing lines of inquiry unfold across years – through multiple forms. Her projects often emerge through sustained relationships with particular places and communities, inviting audiences into participatory acts of deep attention.
Janenne’s interconnected body of work includes projects like SWELL, O_C_E_A_N, Nature Obituary, Deep Sound, Deep See Survey and her debut manuscript, Empathy Bleed. These works ask how art and writing might create the conditions for new and old ways of listening – to one another and nature, as kin.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Often working in direct relationship with place, I invite water, weather, season and moon phase to shape my practice. Deep listening – with land, with sea, with others – is both my methodology and medium: an enduring line of inquiry and an endeavour to open space for experiencing the world in new and often forgotten ways.
Experimentation, participation and collective ritual are repeated threads in my multi art form practice, which includes writing and spoken word, installation and performance, photography and sound. I am drawn to forms of making that unfold from embodied experience and paying attention – that weave together collected framents of feeling, memory and lived experience.
I create works that invite people to pause and encounter others — human and more-than-human — with a remembered empathy. A remembered care.