GILDED BIRDS

Anne Bean, artist, on her tray of bird whistles.

GB Why did you choose your tray of golden birds?

AB It just came to mind immediately. It was so obvious –  gilded birds, and I had literally just gilded some birds. Where else was my mind going to go?

I do find them beautiful, because they’re objects that hadn’t exactly had a purpose, but were part of something larger than themselves and that involved a lot of people. They were part of a launch event I did for Land River Land, a small press publication called KERTECZ . I was part of one issue, and I read a poem which then went into Captain Beefheart’s lyrics:

“Those little golden birdies, look at them

In the mystic Egypt tossle dangling down”

Such a beautiful, haunting, silly, absurd lyric. I’ve always loved being part of that world.

The event was in a small gallery underneath my house, Three Colt Gallery, right by the Thames foreshore –  we’re a minute from it. I wanted to find a way of performing this poem and these lyrics, and then getting the audience to participate in a way that would carry us to the foreshore for the second part of the performance.

Each one of these birds is a water whistle, and I put a tiny drop of Thames water inside each one, so there was almost a sense of them being called back to the river as everyone exited the gallery blowing these whistles. They each produce slightly different harmonics, so together it was really like a flight of birds. I think people in the local neighbourhood thought it was some sort of ancient ritual.

GB How fantastic. And how did you gild them?

AB Gold spray, I’m afraid, not proper gold leaf.

GB Did people run off with them afterwards?

AB A lot were taken, but most people asked. I rather wanted their dispersal, in a way.

GB Do you have pictures or a film of the event?

AB Strangely, I don’t have a picture of everyone going towards the foreshore. It must have caught everyone by surprise.

GB Do you like to record your work more now? I read that you were initially quite resistant to that.

AB I was resistant. And sometimes I can still see exactly why. The paucity of the image compared to the sense of the event can be so frustrating. It seems so out of kilter with what actually happened. That said, I don’t feel militant about it anymore. I used to feel that recording was, in terms of one’s ethos, simply wrong. Now I feel much more open. The genie is out of the bottle when everyone has a camera on them.

GB So do you think your memory of the birds in the performance is more beautiful than the photograph?

AB Yes, because in the memory they’re alive. It was this flock of people, known and unknown, getting into the sense of making sounds together, literally flocking down to the foreshore, which is such a beautiful space. It’s wonderful to have somewhere right by Canary Wharf that still feels genuinely wild; very much part of the Thames, the tides, always changing.

GB Is beauty a conscious part of your work? Do you try to create it?

AB I don’t think of it as trying to create beauty, but there’s a certain sense of harmony one gets when you know something is right. I presume one can call that beauty. I don’t think of beauty as an absolute but I’m very happy when I get that sense that something has really landed, that people could genuinely receive it.

GB That’s interesting, because some of your work is quite unsettling. You still get that feeling of harmony even then?

AB Yes, I think you can.

GB And do you think true beauty can exist in the digital world? Because like you say, it’s never a great representation.

AB It never is, but I don’t see a separation between the digital and the real, or the virtual and actuality, as involving different concepts of beauty. I think it’s still about how people approach it.

GB With so much horror going on in the world right now, does it make you want to seek out beauty? And if so, where do you look?

AB I feel very fortunate to live so close to the Thames, with that huge expanse of water coming in and out. There’s something in Keats’s idea,  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Perhaps in the end one just has to look at something very deeply. It’s wonderful when you’re swept up in a glorious sunset because it literally takes you away from the burden of your responsibilities I travel to see eclipses.  I’ve seen nine.

GB How wonderful.

AB That is the ultimate. You could call it beauty, you could call it transcendence, or ecstatic living for a moment. You cannot think of anything else but the strangeness and extraordinariness of the experience. In those few minutes, sometimes less than a minute, sometimes two, you’re standing in a whole new reality. That did come to mind as one of my thoughts on beauty.

GB How do you look at the eclipse?

AB You have to look through the glasses until the moment the shadow of the moon covers the sun. Then you can look directly. It’s wild. It’s so primal, so ancestral. You sense yourself in time, backwards and forwards. It just replenishes everything.

GB Do you think knowing a great deal about these phenomena makes them more or less beautiful? Carl Sagan has slightly ruined the cosmos  for me. It’s just carbon, carbon, carbon for infinite miles.

AB As a much older person now, I feel I want to come down firmly on the side of the miraculousness of the world, rather than the terror and the horror. I think the younger generation have been overly burdened with so much, and I do want to convey that sense of wonder, without being naive about anything else. Art is an amazing vehicle for that.

GB Do you want your work to outlast you?

AB It’s such an odd question, because, without being pretentious, what is “you”? Is it a name? If I managed to move or inspire or stimulate anybody, even just by being present, that’s enough. We are all receptors and transmitters.

GB Although the little birds might be around for a long time because they’re plastic. Someone might pick one up in a thousand years after some nuclear Armageddon and think, “I found this beautiful little bird.”

AB Yes!

GB Has beauty ever taken you by surprise in your work? I’m thinking about the pieces involving flames, for instance.

AB Yes. There’s a quote I remember, I think it was from the Sunday Times, about the Bow Gamelan Ensemble. It was something like: “Turner meets Apocalypse Now.”

GB Oh, I love that. What a beautiful compliment.

AB Yes, real beauty mixed with terror and overwhelming sound and light. I think we were always very aware of the beauty of that setup, even if we didn’t work towards it as a stated ethos.

GB And I suppose all the senses were involved.

AB All of them. We, Bow Gamelan, did a work on Lots Ait, an island in the Thames where there was a whistle section with high-pressure steam whistles, helium balloon whistles, low-pressure whistles,compressed air whistles, pyrotechnic whistles, blowing vacuum cleaner whistles, this extraordinary mix. It was so intense that several people commented that they felt as though they were floating, as though the sound was carrying them.

GBI read about the Aeolian harp you made on the foreshore during COVID.

AB Yes. I wanted something to be speaking during all that alienation and separation. I placed tight ribbons across the foreshore: eight ribbons, each about a hundred metres long, that responded to the wind and made all these different fluttering sounds. The security guards were suspicious at first, but so many people responded so warmly that we were all rather proud of it.

GB What makes something worthy of the word Beauty to you?

AB I was brought up in Zambia, right by Victoria Falls. We used to go fairly regularly at full moon to see the lunar rainbow, a rainbow at night by moonlight. I found it awe-inspiring then, without realising how extraordinary it was. I think I’ve always had this sense of beauty as having a cosmic dimension, something to do with the whole world coming together and showing itself to you, through prisms and the movement of the moon and the spray. The Victoria Falls is called Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke that Thunders – and that feeling of sound and vision fusing is, to me, so beautiful.

GB And I suppose that works on a much smaller scale too — like your work where you drop water onto a candle flame. The same effect, just miniature.

AB Exactly. Yes,  that’s very nice of you to say.

GB And in relation to your birds specifically,  is it the personal connection, the sentimental attachment, or the memory of the moment that makes them beautiful?

AB I like the fact that they are, in themselves, beautiful objects, but they also have the potential to generate events, participation, collaboration, transportation from one space to another. They fulfilled so many of the concepts I find inspiring.