Bio
Joan Sullivan is a bilingual Canadian photographer and writer focused exclusively on climate change and the energy transition. She uses both documentary and abstract methodologies in her work. She also writes a monthly column about the intersection of art, artists and the energy transition for the international blog Artists and Climate Change.
Act One
Joan Sullivan spent her first 50 years studying/working to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, mostly in Africa. With a masters in public health from Harvard, she criss-crossed the continent at the height of the HIV epidemic, working for a variety of international organizations to fund community-based HIV prevention programs targeting the most vulnerable populations: women, migrants, orphans. She recognizes that it was a privilege, a gift in fact, to have been able to spend so much of her adult life in Africa. It was in Africa that Sullivan's photography matured, thanks in part to Mike Hutchings at Reuters (Johannesburg office) who gave her her first gig as a stringer based in Botswana. Sullivan also moonlighted for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a photographer.
Act Two
Upon returning to Canada, Joan Sullivan turned her cameras to an even greater cause: climate change. Since 2009, she has documented the construction of some of North America's largest wind and solar farms. But the more the climate crisis worsens, the more Sullivan's photography evolves from documentary to abstraction. Joan Sullivan is currently experimenting with intentional camera movement (ICM) as a new language to express her eco-anxiety and solastalgia about the planetary crisis and all that we have already lost.
It was during the "Study of Artistic Practice", a two-year program at the University of Quebec in Rimouski (UQAR) led by Danielle Boutet, that Joan Sullivan started working on her new series of abstract photographs entitled "Je suis fleuve" (English translation: "I am river"). Through this ongoing project, Sullivan embodies the chaos of the disappearing winter ice on the Saint Lawrence River. Since 2020, these "beautiful images filled with dread" (according to a review by Danielle Legentil, 2020) have been exhibited extensively in Quebec's Lower Saint Lawrence region, including the Jardins de Métis, the Centre d'art de Kamouraska, and most recently the Centre d'artistes Caravansérail in Rimouski.
Act Three
The next chapter in Joan Sullivan's evolving artistic practice is audio. She is currently experimenting with underwater recordings of melting ice, which for Sullivan evoke the cry of the belugas. Her next project will be a marriage of moving images and audio recordings in order to create a series of sensory and embodied multidisciplinary installations. Her first installation is planned for early 2023. But first, she has been invited to a winter residency along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, at the famous Jardins de Métis in eastern Quebec. Stay tuned for more information in the coming months.
Technical note
All images in Joan Sullivan's ongoing series of abstract photographs about climate change are created in-camera using intentional camera movement (ICM). Only minor adjustments to contrast, clarity and texture are applied using Adobe Lightroom CC. No images were modified using Photoshop.