BEAN FINNERAN Red Cone, 2007 400 curves, hand rolled and painted low fire clay, glaze, and acrylic approx. 12 x 15 inches Price: $2,500 Courtesy of the artist

BEAN FINNERAN Purple Cone, 2007 400 curves, hand rolled and painted low fire clay, glaze, and acrylic approx. 12 x 15 inches Price: $2,500 Courtesy of the artist

Bean Finneran was born in 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Goucher College, the University of Michigan, the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Massachusetts College of Art. Today she lives and works in the Bay area, where she has been featured in regular solo and group exhibitions since 1997. In 2005, Finneran was included in the 3rd World Ceramics Bienniale, sponsored by the World Ceramic Exposition Foundation in Incheon City, Korea.

Finneran’s studio is located near a tidal marsh outside of San Francisco, and the location provides her with a constant but constantly changing view of water and grasses. Nature thus offers inspiration for Finneran’s complex, often site-specific installations, comprised of hundreds or thousands of slender, hand-rolled rods of fired clay that are then painted with acrylics, often in quite “un-natural” colors. Though abstract, the constructions have the power to evoke real things: windblown grasses, sea anemones, coral reefs, sea-urchins.