Taïs Bean is a French multidisciplinary artist of Scottish, Indian, and Corsican heritage. A graduate of Central Saint Martins (2015), she has developed a practice rooted in the intersections of art, ecology, and inner transformation, working across Europe and North Africa. For over a decade, her research has explored ecology through psychology, mythology, and embodied experience. Influenced by diverse cosmologies and eco-psychology, she investigates cycles of life, death, and regeneration, as well as inner conflict and transformation.
What most deeply inspires your practice?
What inspires me most is nature, the perpetual movement of it, the way nothing gets wasted, everything is constantly moving towards more life and more creation. Where we tend to see death or an ending, Nature only sees new shapes. We tend to attribute life to something fixed, we get attached to states or forms. Nature reminds us life is aliveness, aliveness is change. I'm deeply fascinated by transformation.
Mythology and alchemy are central to how I think, because they do something the rational mind can't: they help us make sense of fundamental things while preserving their mystery; our relationship to our mortality, to nature, to each other…through poetry, through the heart, through a sense of aliveness.
And what I love most about mythology is that it gives meaning in a way that actually creates more mystery. I want my work to do that too — to be a kind of mythopoetic language for my own human experience, and for the collective human experience I witness as someone living in these times.
Where do your ideas originate?
I don't think they're really my ideas. I think they're ideas that want to come to life, and they probably whisper to a lot of people. My tool is my ability to feel, and the imagination I have, the way my feelings come with images, and the way images evoke feelings in me. It's a bit like dreaming. I fully experience the dream, and when I wake up I try to make sense of it. And maybe a few years later it reveals something completely different.
I have this relationship with my ideas where I feel I'm in collaboration with another living thing that's leading me.
I start painting, or singing, or writing, and something reveals itself in that process. I know an idea is worth following when it feels like something has entered the room and is keeping me company. Even when the theme is really difficult, if I can feel a level of love and compassion overarching the whole experience: then I know I am aligned with the inspiration and must work for it while it works through me.
Are there particular myths or archetypes that inform your work?
The myth that never left me since childhood is the greek myth of Persephone. When I was in my early twenties I started using my art to explore it, rewriting it, and I ended up finding the pre-Hellenic version, which felt so much closer to what I always believed that myth was truly about.
In that version, there's no abduction. Persephone goes into the Underworld compassionately and courageously, because she can see lost souls who haven't fully gone through the process of death. She goes down, knowing that means she will have to die. She experiences death herself, is brought back to life 3 days later, and having gone through that initiation, she becomes able to help those souls. She becomes the force that starts the seasonal cycle, because she had empathy, clarity of vision and the courage and compassion to face death, not just for herself, but for the health of the entire ecosystem of life. There's something in that story about a cycle we find in nature and in ourselves. At the core of our humanity there's that thing we have to do, face our mortality, face symbolic deaths, face change, let go of what we think we know… and the closer we are to that, in an intimate and conscious way, the closer we are to life itself. That myth has kept unravelling for me for years, new teachings and universe are continuously emerging from it. It keeps feeding my work and outlook on life to this day.
What emotional landscape do you seek to evoke through your work?
I'm hoping my work can do for others what it does for me — which is go to places that might feel difficult, places or feelings that feel isolating because they're so profound and hard to hold alone, or simply because they feel so much larger than us that we fear we might drown. But in going there with the light and lovingness of art, that's where I find my humanity and my connection to what makes me human, and therefore my connection to the rest of humanity, and to life itself. The loneliness of it evaporates, and suddenly I'm with what being alive truly means. I want people to feel seen in a way they maybe haven't dared to see themselves. I want it to make them feel less alone, and to reveal to them that there is so much beauty in being alive, even in grief, even in fear, even in disconnection. These things are part of our aliveness. If we bring them back to the table and treat them with equal importance and care, we become more complete, more vibrant, more alive. And our heart’s ability to feel the love that is available to us can keep expanding.
With my first solo show in Lisbon, I'm using grief specifically as a gateway, not to linger in pain, but to find at its root a deep reconnection to love, to aliveness, to a celebration of life. Just as nature transforms, I want people to feel that if you really allow yourself to be with the grief and face the darkness, that's actually the way through it, that's how it becomes new life.
What does a perfect day dedicated to art and culture in Lisbon look like for you?
I'm still quite new in Lisbon, so a perfect day here is still really about discovering. I love to walk, so I'd probably want to walk in the sun to somewhere I haven't been before, just let myself get lost. I love to daydream in the streets, enjoy the view of the river. It's quite simple, really. I'd want to discover new galleries, new museums, spend time in parks which are wonderful places to sit after a good show. And I imagine just digesting something slowly ,an exhibition I've seen, letting it sit and breathe as I wander. I'm still getting to know this city, and I just love that feeling of discovering I through the art that is made and shown here.
