Joli Livaudais: The States Project: Arkansas

Joli Livaudais: The States Project: Arkansas by Donna PinckleyFebruary 24, 2018

©Joli Livaudais, Acts of Service

Lastly, on Day Five, I end my job as the Arkansas Lenscratch’s State Project Editor with Joli Livaudais. I have only known Joli for a couple years and every time I see her I learn so much. Joli not only has a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography but also has two other degrees in experimental psychology. She has used both historical photographic processes and contemporary alternative methods, including gum bi-chromate printing, photo sculpture and installation. The project I chose to feature is And then I will See. This body of work is so multi-faceted for me I get lost in every image. I hope you do too!

Joli Livaudais received her BA and MS in Experimental Psychology from the University of Texas at Arlington before establishing herself as a freelance commercial photographer in Dallas, Texas. She received her MFA from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana in 2013, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Her fine art photography explores both historical photographic processes and contemporary alternative methods, including gum bichromate printing, photo sculpture and installation, and incorporates her interest in both psychology and spirituality. Her artwork has been featured in both solo and group shows nationwide, and she was featured as a historical process gum bichromate artist in Christina Anderson’s text on the process, Gum Printing: A Step-By-Step Manual, Highlighting Artists and Their Creative Practice, published in 2016.

And Then Will I See

My artwork is my meditation on the mysteries of nature, domesticity, and relationships, but it is also about my search for wisdom when my own flaws and frailties guarantee a myopic view of whatever truth I might discern. I find that my carefully weighed conclusions about the human condition and my own place within it challenge me more than they provide any meaningful sense of safety, comfort, or promise of a happy ending. To exist is to struggle; to seek answers, however flawed they may be, is inevitable. In my artwork, this translates as an attention to process and labor intensive practice.

And Then I Will See is created by a multi-step process of pinhole photographs, double exposures, digitally hand applied color, and then printing the photographs using the historical process of gum bichromate. Each print takes many hours to complete. The patterns, layering, repetition and fragmentation are processes found in nature that are integral to the work and the meditation of creating it. – Joli Livaudais