BIT BY BIT

The art of Bean Finneran moves us through wonderment, a visual poetry without words. Much like listening to grass blow in the wind or watching sea life pulse in water, you feel a stillness inside you as you witness everything move around you. Her forms suggest fragments of a conversation, sound bites from nature, or layering of language. Upon construction (and deconstruction) you experience the musicality of the work, clay tinking and sliding gently to create forms that reference the vocabularies of geometry and organized chaos. Each sculpture is composed of thousands of handmade ceramic elements, placed one by one, with the shape determined as space and form speak to the artist – no single piece is the same.

“I compose with bright color and form in a space. I work with simple elemental curves and geometric shapes of the most basic natural material, clay.  The sculptures grow in the space by adding curve after curve or block after block. The sculptural compositions are built curve-by-curve, block-by-block and disassembled one by one. This process of potential continual change and transformation connects me to the natural world along with the ordered chaos that comes from organizing thousands and thousands of individual elements into a temporary form or composition.”

“BIT BY BIT” is part of the countywide exhibition Spoken/Unspoken. The project was made possible through the generosity of a donor-advised grant from the Roy and Frances Rydell Visual Arts Fund at Community Foundation Santa Cruz County.

On exhibition February 7 - April 8, 2018

Artist's Talk: Sunday, March 18, 2018