Bean Finneran

Born in 1947, Cleveland, OH

Goucher College, Baltimore, MD

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Museum School, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA

Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA

Bean Finneran lives near San Francisco in an isolated spot on the edge of a salt marsh. This is important in understanding her work, which is constantly thought about and conceived in front of this spectacle of nature that is unchanging, yet changes with every moment.

Through her work, Bean Finneran reveals this nature that she loves. But let’s be clear about this: she doesn’t try to imitate it. Her works are deliberately abstract. What Bean Finneran shows us is a reconstruction that uses observed elements that form the basic principles of life and not its outer appearance. Bean Finneran is not interested in representing nature through landscapes as man has been doing through centuries of artistic activity.

Her privileged observation of nature has enabled her to see the unchanging forces and principles that lay behind the apparent disorder of the spectacle that life offers. Living, organic matter is a construction made up of components – always the same – that are assembled for a more or less limited period. Interpreted symbolically, these become a series of united, organised signs formed by a single basic entity: a coil of clay given a random, curvilinear form by firing. Bean Finneran incorporates these forces and principles inherent to nature into her creative processes and makes them deliberately perceptible in the finished work through an apparent disorder from which – despite everything - we are given an impression of balance.

Bean Finneran seeks to share her sensitive experience of nature in the galleries and museums that exhibit her works. These are in an urban environment in limited spaces that are, by their very essence, totally different to the open, unlimited spaces offered by nature in which human presence is necessarily sporadic. This choice is calculated and even strategic. The elements taken – mentally – from nature are, in the end, simply transposed here. The ceramics, the pigments used and the setting-up time are the vehicle for the sensory impressions that Bean Finneran experiences. She deliberately and warm-heartedly seeks to meet her public. The visitor is thus invited to relive her experiences and feel her impressions through her works.

Her work bears some similarities to Land art, from which she has disassociated herself. She retains the basic principles but reinterprets them to suit her needs. The use of untreated materials and simple, even primitive techniques – build-up –, places her work within a romantic vision of life close to nature.

Yves Peltier