Independent Critic,Maria F. Porges wrote the following:
“Though essentially abstract, Bean Finneran’s sculpture often makes us think of the real things: haystacks, windblown grasses, coral branches, or even the gracefully chaotic tangle of debris dumped by waves on a beach when the tide recedes. Such allusions seem natural in the work of an artist who has spent much of her life at the water’s edge. After an adolescence spent in Florida, Finneran moved to northern California in her mid-twentites. For more than two decades, she has lived and worked in a tidal marsh only a few miles from San Francisco. Her home and studio are part of a line of buildings that punctuate a picturesque boardwalk meandering through a sea of grass and water. From the deck around her studio, a view of austere yet spectacular beauty can be seen in every direction, as if from the deck of a ship.
Clearly this environment has been part of Finneran’s inspiration. For the past several years, she has been experimenting with simple sculptural shapes constructed out of thousands of curved rods of fired clay. No glue of fasteners connect the slender arcs, each about the size and thickness of a pencil, which she uses to compose the cones, nests and circles, and lines in her installations. Essentially, only gravity holds the twig like forms in place, in the same kind of random yet orderly patterns as the reeds and sedge that she sees every day out her studio windows.”