PRESS RELEASE
Anne Bean: My Tribe Creates Me
4 –14 March 2026
England & Co at 36 Great Pulteney Street, London W1F 9NS
Private view Wednesday 4 March
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.”
This exhibition features a substantial group of these recent ceramic sculptures, accompanied by photographic works that emerged from her performances, with film and a small group of selected artworks spanning her career from 1970 to today.
At 3.00 pm on Saturday 14 March, Bean will perform Reflections on Three Weeks in May 1970.
As space is limited, please email the gallery to reserve a place.
Anne Bean has presented numerous solo and collaborative projects internationally and in the UK since 1970, and was awarded the Thinker in Residence award by Tate Research and the Live Art Development Agency in 2008. The book, Anne Bean: Self Etc, an extensive survey of her practice, was published by Intellect Books and the Live Art Development Agency in 2018, and she was awarded a Visual Artist Award from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in 2024. Bean was represented in Tate Britain’s exhibition, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 in 2024, and her work was acquired by Tate the same year. She was recently included in Lines of Resolution: Drawing in the Advent of Television and Video at the Menil Collection in Houston, USA and has a screening of a recent film collaboration with Alex Eisenberg at Matt’s Gallery on Friday 6 March.
Bean has exhibited regularly with England & Co since 2016, including at Paris Photo and Photo London.
Anne Bean: How Things Used to Be Now, a solo exhibition with the gallery in 2019, was followed by a Spotlight presentation of her work at Frieze Masters in 2022.
