The Centre for Energy Ethics is thrilled to officially welcome our third Artist-in-Residence, Joan Sullivan. Joan’s residency will be split across three visits to Scotland in March 2025, November 2025, and again in March 2026 for her final presentation: a short poetic film to be projected onto the outer walls of the St Salvador Quad.
In between these three visits, Joan will be working from her home in Quebec, Canada, on her project “Invisible Electrons” through which she wants to explore – in non-documentary and non-linear ways – how to imagine energy beaming down from our solitary star. To date, Joan has been inspired by visits to the School of Physics and Astronomy, the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Joan also hopes to meet scholars/students from the University Music Centre to discuss opportunities for collaboration on a minimalistic soundtrack for her experimental film.
Joan is an independent photographer, writer and ‘artivist’ who lives on a small farm in rural Québec, Canada. With a Master’s degree in Public Health from Harvard University, she spent nearly two decades in sub-Saharan Africa working on HIV prevention programmes before returning to Canada at age 50 to devote full-time to photography. Joan is bilingual, has published essays in both French and English and her recent artwork that gives voice to the nonhuman has been described in the academic journal Springer Nature (2024). You can see more of Joan’s work on her website.
