Through a process of accumulation, both Bean Finneran and the collaborative team of Jon Clark and Angus Powers push the possibilities of their chosen media into site-specific installations. For each project at the Art Alliance, thousands of simple smaller forms, created in glass or ceramics, were used as the building blocks for the resulting large scale sculptures/site pieces. The final installations explored such ideas as organic growth, natural selection in plants and animals, and cosmology. Both challenged the inherent properties of their chosen medium, pushing the boundaries between traditional uses of ceramic and glass into the realms of  sculpture and installation art.

 

The glass sculpture of Jon Clark often explores organic life forms that are evocative of reproductive elements in plants and flowers, and dynamic life forms from obscure underwater havens. The work of Angus Powers incorporates his interest in planetary imagery, utilizing motion and light for his sculptural work. For their installation at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, these concerns were extended into a combination of light, sound, and glass that transformed the gallery space into a moving sea of natural forms. The video for the installation incorporated reflected light recorded from nature in order to create what the artists state is “a cycle of time and energy evolution, within a framework of erupting transparent forms.” 

 

Bean Finneran’s love of the natural world and saturated color are combined to create her abstract ceramic sculptures that are evocative of organic forms and animals, such as grasses and sea anemones. Working with a simple elemental form, a curve made from the most basic natural material of clay, Finneran built new sculptural forms in the galleries for the exhibition with hundreds or thousands of these forms. The geometry of a curve weaves and allows construction, and the clay curves are each similar but unique connecting them to the natural world. The process that is used to construct the sculptures follows patterns found in nature.

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Gravity installation video

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