New ceramic work
Finneran lives at the edge of a salt marsh in California. Her love of the natural world and saturated color are combined to create her abstract sculptures that are evocative of organic forms and animals, such as grasses and sea anemones. She has had solo exhibits at Kemper Museum of Art, the Davis Art Center Gallery, and San Jose Art Museum, among others, and featured in American Ceramics. In 2005 Finneran was included in the 3rd World Ceramics Bienniale, sponsored by the World Ceramic Exposition Foundation in Icheon City, Korea.
Bean Finneran's exhibition at PDX Contemporary Art in March 2006 will be on display concurrent with the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Conference in Portland, OR.
"Then look at the human anatomy. We are all curved surfaces, curving structure, curving muscle and sinew. This form evolved because it minimizes the amount of materials and maximizes structural strength."
- Eugene Tsui
I work with a simple elemental form, a curve made from the most basic natural material, clay. I make and build with hundreds or thousands of these forms. The clay curve connects me to time, the earth, the elements and human culture. The geometry of a curve weaves and allows construction. The clay curves I roll are each similar but unique connecting them to the natural world where blades of grass are almost the same but never quite the same. The process I use to construct the sculptures follows the patterns in nature. The shapes grow in the space allotted them through adding curve after curve. The forms are always transitory, in a space for a given amount of time. The sculptures cannot be moved without taking them apart and reconstructing them. They are built curve-by-curve and disassembled one by one. This process of continual and possible change and transformation connects me to the natural world along with the ordered chaos that comes from organizing thousands upon thousands of individual elements into a form. I garden. I love color and light and the changes light and shadows create. With the sculptures I compose with bright color and form in a space. With its deliberately 'un-natural' color, the work celebrates aspects of nature but does not attempt to mimic it. The constructions are abstract ... rings, lines, cones, circles but often evoke real things: sea anemones, coral reefs, haystacks or wind blown grasses.
- Bean Finneran, 2005
