Rana Begum: Taking Form

FÜ: That movement between order and instinct seems fundamental in your works. Where, precisely, does intuition enter a practice otherwise governed by such formal control?

RB: The geometry creates the order, but the colour relationships are much more instinctive. There isn't a mathematical formula telling me which colour should sit next to which. I actually tried a more mathematical approach to colour, and it didn't feel right. It left too little room for accident and discovery. When the process became too calculated, I felt that I was losing something. I wanted to recover that openness.

I spent many years looking at light and form before I felt ready to explore colour properly. I knew that colour needed its own time and attention. Growing up in Bangladesh, I was surrounded by colour. It was everywhere, in saris, clothing, cinema, architecture and everyday life. It was completely ingrained in me. Yet, strangely, I wasn't confident about using colour in my work. I needed to give myself permission to really investigate it. My research has always needed to be physical.

English is my second language, and I am dyslexic, so approaching research purely through theory was difficult for me. I found that I understood things through making, touching, looking and testing. I could spend hours trying to understand a theoretical text and not necessarily absorb it, but I could take a material into the studio and begin to understand what it was doing through my hands. So the studio became a place of research.

FÜ: In that sense, making is not the application of knowledge but its production. Does that explain the presence of the watercolours here, the need to retain a form of making that remains immediate and close to the body?

RB: Yes. I knew the exhibition needed something looser, more instinctive. I was struggling with that for months. A lot of the works involve fabrication. The scale means that I am sometimes further removed from the physical act of making. The linen, for example, developed through a collaboration with a company in Bristol and was then produced in Scotland. I initially painted the linen by hand, but as the scale increased, the process changed. The heat in the studio meant the paint was drying so quickly that I couldn't physically keep up with it. Fabricating the colouring process changed the way the paint behaved. The transparency became even more apparent, which I actually liked, but something else was lost: the trace of my hand.

The MDF works also involved processes that moved further away from me physically. And I became increasingly conscious of that distance. So the watercolours became important because they brought the hand back into the exhibition. They are fluid and instinctive and fast. Not that speed itself was the objective, but the marks reveal my thinking in a different way. They show the movement of the hand, the hesitation, the decision. They introduce something more immediate and human.

FÜ: So scale and fabrication produce a paradox: the work becomes more expansive while your physical proximity to it diminishes. The watercolours restore that proximity.

RB: Yes, absolutely. That's something I've only really understood while making this exhibition.

I think scale brings incredible possibilities, but it also changes your relationship to the work. When you're making something small, you are physically close to it. When you're making something five metres tall, the body can't have the same relationship with it. You need other people, other technologies, other processes. That is exciting, but I also need to find ways of maintaining a sense of human touch within that.

FÜ: The exhibition consequently produces a choreography of scale: the watercolours require intimacy, while the tapestries require distance. What does that movement between them make possible?

RB: The watercolours draw you in. You can stand quite close and have a very intimate relationship with the paper. Then, with the tapestries, you have to step back. You need distance to understand the colour interaction and the scale of the work. So your body is constantly moving between proximity and distance.

That is something I think about a lot now. Earlier in my practice I thought I wasn't interested in the body because I wasn't interested in figurative representation. But I realise now that my work is very much about the body. It is about how someone physically connects with a work, how they move around it, how close they stand, what happens to their perception as they move.

FÜ: You have described precision as both a source of calm and something you need to escape. Is the tension between those impulses what generates movement in the work?

RB: I think precision is something I crave and something I need to escape from. My mentor, Tess Jaray, and I used to talk about this. She once said to me that precision is something we strive for in life but can never completely achieve because everything around us is chaotic. That stayed with me.

My life is chaotic. I have children, family, relationships, work, everything is constantly moving. But in the studio I can create a certain kind of order. A straight line gives me a feeling that I can't quite put into words. A curved line gives me something completely different.

There are moments when I need to let go of the square, rectangle and triangle. When I do, something happens. Something more playful or accidental enters. But then I crave the order again. I want to return to sharpness and structure. So I am constantly moving between freedom and control. I think that is what I mean by an organic geometry. The structure doesn't disappear; it becomes less obvious.

FÜ: Openness, then, is not a rejection of structure but a consequence of structure being unable to exhaust experience.

RB: Yes. That’s a really good way of putting it. The structure gives you something, but it doesn't determine what you experience. I think that's also why I am interested in light. Light is never completely stable. It changes the work without the work itself changing. A material can look completely different in the morning and in the afternoon. Transparency can alter what is visible. Your position can change the colour. The architecture can change the work. So the work is materially present but never entirely fixed.

FÜ: Which brings us to Taking Form. The title suggests that form is not an achieved state but an ongoing process, something produced through material, light, movement and perception.

RB: Yes. I like that idea. Form isn’t necessarily an endpoint. For me, making is a process of trying to understand something. And sometimes what I'm trying to understand is not even something I can name. I am trying to find that moment when everything comes into alignment, the colour, the form, the light, the material, the space. When that happens, I have this incredible feeling. It’s almost physical. I'm inside screaming, “Oh my God, I can't believe these three things have just come together.” And then I want to do it again. I want to push it further. That is probably why I keep moving between materials. Once I begin to understand what a material can do, I want to know what happens if I push it a little further.