Rana Begum: Taking Form

The Third Line is pleased to present Rana Begum’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring a new body of works across linen, textile, wood, and paper. The exhibition continues Begum’s exploration of textiles, bringing the medium into dialogue with her ongoing interest in light, color, and material. While embracing a turn towards softness and delicacy, the works in Taking Form build on Begum's longstanding engagement with abstraction and Minimalism, continuing her exploration of light through new materials and forms. This engagement with geometry runs throughout: forms suggest patterns that extend beyond their physical boundaries. Drawing on Islamic geometry, the square and rectangle establish defined perimeters, while the configurations within them suggest a sense of continuation. The geometry is never truly contained.

Begum moves fluidly across various media such as metal, paper, wood, terracotta, and mesh. Her latest work with wool, creating large-scale tapestries, is a testament to this versatility. Suspended from the ceiling in Gallery 1, Begum’s nearly five-meter-tall tapestries draw the viewer’s gaze upwards, transforming the gallery into a vast, immersive field of cascading color. Begum’s interest in woven surfaces dates back to 2022, when she was commissioned to design seat covers and tapestries as part of the Bristol Beacon’s transformation project. Her collaboration with the textile studio Dash & Miller for the project has continued through the large-scale tapestries in Taking Form, exploring how material, color, and scale come together to create a sense of expansion within the gallery space. The tapestries are composed of colored triangles, drawing on the geometric abstraction that characterizes Begum’s visual language. These colors are not just layered but woven together using the ridging technique, resulting in a dual pattern that is revealed only as the viewer moves around them.

Adjacent to the monumental tapestries, the paper works are studies of color interaction, using watercolor marks to explore how hues respond to one another. Their pale, aqueous tones echo the labor-intensive process of combining colors in the tapestries, distilled here into just a few strokes and creating a visual link between the two rooms.

Begum continues her exploration of textiles through a series of large-scale linen paintings in Gallery 2. These works extend her longstanding interest in how paint interacts with different surfaces, from reflective mirror and glass to more absorbent materials such as wood, paper, and canvas. Here, this structure, particularly the use of overlapping triangles, is translated onto linen through layers of diluted acrylic paint. The natural, unprocessed tone and texture of the linen influence the color as it is absorbed into the weave, creating a sense of rawness and an organic quality across the surface. The resulting interplay of paint and linen allows the works to evoke the shifting qualities of light through color. Alongside the linens, a set of wooden panel paintings punctuate the space with playful accents through their smaller scale and subtle shifts in color. Though the colors themselves are light, they build upon one another, creating changes in density as more layers accumulate. The smooth surface of the wooden panels holds the paint differently, allowing for a more consistent veil of color across the surface. Together, both series create a luminous field across the gallery, with a gentle rhythm that shifts as the viewer moves through the space.

Begum has explored light throughout her practice, considering the shifting sensory effects it produces through different combinations of color, material, and scale. The works in Taking Form continue this exploration, inviting viewers to move through the galleries at their own pace and discover changing hues, forms, and rhythms along the way.