About
I am a visual artist based in Hull, working across both commissioned and self-initiated projects. My practice spans a variety of materials and processes, including photography, filmmaking, collage, animation, drawing and painting.
I’m particularly interested in how identity is shaped by the persistent memories of our cultural past, such as television, cinema, theatre, art, and music and how these influences resonate with our sense of self and existence.
My work often involves designing concepts, sets, costumes, props, and characters for immersive installations and theatrical events, developed in collaboration with performers.
Audience participation is a valued part of my artistic process. I aim to create experiences that invite playfulness, imagination, and moments of joyful absurdity.
Like stepping through pages of dark faerie tales, trying on different heads for size. Imagery just as likely to be re-inventing a musician's creative identity, as adorning gallery walls in ornate frames; her work is part dreamlike Dali; part magic realism of Dahl; part homage to horror and all Bean. The line between this world and the one which Anna's creations inhabit is gossamer thin. Often using friends and family members in her lavish scenes, the images simultaneously invite and unnerve the viewer.
Attention to detail, to time and period, lend the images authenticity, lavish costume, make-up and masks appeal to the extrovert and the introspect equally: perfectly easy to hide behind a mask. Anna's chimeric world has escaped the confines of the frame of late, to dance and move on the stage, in contemporary shows and festival settings. The garish sheen of Gothic horror/fantasy is unmistakably Anna Bean with a storyteller's hand she creates scenes that play on the irresistible power and infinite possibilities of transformation.
You can be anything in here anything, anything at all. For centuries anthropomorphism has been captivating the minds of children and adults alike ever since the wolf leaped out of bed wearing grandma's nightdress and cap and gobbled the little girl up... Michelle Dee