Press Information
Radiant Fields is Anne Bean’s first exhibition for Matt’s Gallery, and marks her return to working with video after twenty years. Anne is known primarily for her performance work; since the early seventies she has undertaken numerous solo and collaborative performances world wide.

Radiant Fields originated with concerns the artist had as a young child - a sense that somehow ones’ eyes were inadequate, their spectrum and physiology too restricted, to embrace the unseen presences of which one was constantly aware. A similar dissatisfaction infiltrated her art as a young teenager where painting as a process seemed vibrantly alive and pungent, but as a finished product seemed to deflate, or die in front of her. She wrote passionately about these concerns at the time, trying to explore a way of capturing a sense of being in the process of painting. Almost imperceptibly Bean’s paintings became sculptures and installations, which in turn became process and performance, and finally contained the fulfilment painting had lacked for her. Radiant Fields looks at this ‘dialogue’ with painting that led Bean into process-based work. The artist has also incorporated texts from her early writings dealing with these concerns, which had been written consciously to a future self. The work, in one sense, is a reply back through time.

Radiant Fields is a new performance work composed of three videos projected onto three constructed screen walls. On entering the gallery the visitor will be visually and aurally surrounded as in a live event. The piece employs high-resolution thermal imaging mixed in with digital video material of the artist and other performers, these were then edited to form a triptych of interlocking and sequential images. It is the complex and textural intertwining of these images, performances, spoken texts and music that invoke an unseen presence - the hidden phenomena and energy fields of parallel universes. It questions our assumptions about the way we see the world - that our senses are in some way ‘absolute’ and it allows both literally and metaphorically a world of fluid, flowing particles where sound and touch can be ‘seen’, and where even in complete darkness the visual world explodes in vibrant colour. Radiant Fields represents a filmic aesthetic exploration of new technologies as an enabling tool to examine the nature of human perception of the natural world.

Radiant Fields was filmed in 1997 by William Raban and Begonia Tamarit. The performers include: Tabla player Ansuman Biswas; drummers Paul Burwell and Dean Roderix; singer Mary Genis; 8 year old southern Indian dancer Swarup Menon; 6 year old writer Ezra Rubenstein and 5 year old Alethea Raban. The work was produced by on-line editor Alistair Kerr and sound engineer Daniel O’Shea.

The project originated with an I.C.A. Toshiba New Technology Award (1997), was supplemented by an Arts Council Combined Arts Award (1998) and with sponsorship from Agema Infrared Systems.

Biography
Born Livingstone Zambia 1950, lives and works in London Studied 1968 – 1973 University of Cape Town and Reading University, England. Anne Bean’s first public performances were in 1969 in Cape Town, South Africa. Since then, she has created many solo works and has initiated and participated in numerous collaborative projects, traveling through Britain, Europe, America, Mexico, Southern Africa and Japan. Bean has represented British Performance Art in Imports, Kitchen Gallery, New York; British Radical Theatre at a banquet for Chancellor Schmidt and Henry Kissinger in Bonn; has twice participated in the Hayward Annual, and has had shows and residencies in many countries and venues including Palais Des Beaux, Brussels; Rudolf Zwerner Gallery, Cologne; Franklyn Furnace, New York; Procownia Dziekanka, Warsaw; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Vanguard Gallery, Los Angeles; Creative Time Inc., New York; ICA, London; Orchard Gallery, Derry; America Centre, Paris; Gulbenkian Institute, Lisbon; Whitechapel Gallery, London; St. Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh; Jubilee Gardens London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Pompidou Centre, Paris. In 1983 Bean co-founded the Bow Gamelan Ensemble with drummer PD. Burwell and sculptor Richard Wilson. In 1988 they won the Time Out Dance and Performance Award, with the comment ‘they serve up adventure in music, sculpture and performance that dazzle the eyes, astonish the ears and stimulate the imagination of viewers with unorthodox magic’. In 1991 Bean was awarded the Time Out Dance and Performance Award for a second time for her long-standing contribution to live arts. Recent solo work includes 2002 A Short History of Performance, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 2003 Falling in Love with a Chair performance/ installation, National Review of Live Art, Glasgow 2004 DIY, LADA; Sounding Off, UEL; Xylo-renaissance for Peckham’s diaspora, Area 10, London; 7 x 7, the Slice, Greenwich; Rockets and Blue Lights, Margate Festival; Painting with Light, Café Gallery, London; Reap, a one year project with Café Gallery, London; FIX04, Belfast international performance festival 2005 Ash Wednesday, Dilston Grove, London; Vent, Evolving Cities, OVADA, Oxford; Oxford 2015, MOMA Oxford; INTERAKCJE festival, Poland; KISSS,Whitechapel Art Gallery; KISSS, Conical Gallery, Melbourne Australia; Power Plant, Botanic Gardens Oxford; Yearnings, Southwark, London; Her Noise, South London Gallery, London