Anna Best

Anna’s art practice has a conceptual approach and over time she has employed a large number of techniques and media. The foregrounding of process has been a key thread. Earlier work embraced complexity, invited contingency and explored networks of relationships. She has developed a solo studio based practice, outside of commissions or public contexts, drawing and writing. Her work is shown as drawings, sculptural installations, as single screen video and as printed matter.

Previous projects involved other people, manifesting as live experiences, when the event was also a context-specific installation. These were commissioned by publicly funded art organisations and she worked in public space, asking the question, “When, as opposed to what, is the art?” The audience were within the scene and part of the work. There was narrative, but definitely non-linear. Projects were both visual images and live explorations, ephemeral, ‘total works of art’. They intervened in the institutional agenda, for example, Occasional Sights, The Photographers Gallery, reinterprets the photograph as an action rather than an image; error 404, e-2.org, satirises the newly emerging internet as a department store; Mecca, Camden Arts Centre, and The Wedding Project , Tate Modern, critically explore the Art For All agenda of “community outreach”. During this time Anna was interested in independence from the commercial art market, focussing on affiliations and collaborations with other artists, composers, writers, designers, such as Neil Chapman, Ella Gibbs and Paul Whitty. These working relationships were combined with curating and organising artists led projects,  for example Shave Artist Workshops 1991-7 and Road for the Future 2012. She has explored the role of host and guest,  facilitating dialogue through The Mothership 2016-2022, at her studio in Dorset.

Most recently she has produced a book – Limestone Interruptions; sculpture –  Bone China; and is collaborating with Nick Berkeley on a publication of photographs and drawings. – 56:65 [The Sex Pictures].  All this work is for sale.