Exhibition (online)
Anne Bean: My Tribe Creates Me
2 Mar-14 Mar 2026
England & Co
London W1F 9NS
Anne Bean, Visionaries, 2024, Ceramic
Overview
Anne Bean, an influential exponent of live art and performance, is a many-faceted artist who has resisted a conventional art world career and followed her own personal trajectory of enquiry, expressing it in 1973 as “What is Art and What am I doing in it?”
From her early childhood in the 1950s, when she and her friends played with mud by the Zambezi River, to a residency decades later at the Sidney Nolan Trust in 2016, where she made clay and water-patterned paintings in the Hindwell River, and with her many interventions with the Thames in London, Anne Bean has long been drawn to working with the medium of clay.
When she came to the UK, and was an art student at Reading University from 1969 to 1973, one of her first projects was to construct a series of clay and resin shapes referencing ancient raised earthen burial mounds like those built for centuries on the flood plains of Zambia.
Bean has always been “captivated by process”, be it her use of ephemeral materials such as fire and pyrotechnics in performances, her transformations of found objects, or her works using more conventional materials such as ink and paint. However, it was not until a potter friend invited her to participate in a summer workshop around seven years ago, that Bean began this series of spirited ceramic sculptures that now form part of her continuous, experimental practice, where the emphasis is always on the creative act itself.
Bean says that she “tried to have no volition at the genesis of each piece, allowing the forms to plug into inner worlds. These subliminal catalysts often arose from childhood and adolescent searching.”
“The works in My Tribe Creates Me emerged from the clay itself and whatever mysterious encounters that had transpired in the process. Manifestations arose from numerous quests including Jungian collective consciousness and dream-worlds; Revelations, Eden and the concept of innocence and paradise; Kabbalistic Emanations, Creations, Formations and Actions; R. D. Laing’s divided selves; belief and disbelief systems; birth and rebirth, cycles, otherworldly presences; Duchampian esoteric and alchemical processes; equilibrium; Buddhist auras, mantles and omens; Magi and the many other voyagers led by stars.”