Rana Begum
(Picture: handout)If you’re anything like me, when you find yourself trotting around an exquisite stately home you’ll be the one sniffing “bit dark though innit” as you brush past painstakingly carved mouldings and elaborate wooden doors. Not, though, at Pitzhanger Manor, the country estate belonging to the late-18th century architect Sir John Soane, in Ealing. The ingenious way he draws light into each part of this surprisingly domestic-scale manor house is extraordinary, which is one reason why the London artist Rana Begum is such a brilliant choice to have a solo exhibition there, opening tomorrow.
“It’s amazing,” she enthuses over steak and chips around the corner from her purpose-built Stoke Newington studio, where the work for the show is being completed. “It’s beautiful. As you walk around, you feel like you’re constantly in the light. I wanted the work to respond to that.” She was also struck by the grace of Soane’s rooms, “how you move through the space. It’s quite interesting, there’s just a flow, it’s as if it’s never-ending.”
She sees a direct correlation between them and her own art. “I like that, especially when I use geometry, the idea of the infinite comes through in a lot of my work, whether it’s the painting, the mirror tile pieces, or the jesmonite works or even the cloud [among her most recent works is a diaphanous collection of delicate, pastel clouds made from metal mesh and suspended in space, a version of which will feature at Pitzhanger] it feels like there’s kind of never-ending aspect to it, and it could grow.”
Unless you’re a regular visitor to commercial galleries (she’s represented by Kate MacGarry in the East End) you might not be familiar with Begum’s work, though outside of the capital she’s had solo shows at Tate St Ives, the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich and Djangoly Gallery in Nottingham. Her geometrically patterned beach huts were a standout at the Folkestone Triennial last summer, and a show of recent work has just closed at the Mead Gallery in Warwick. Later this month, a new site-specific public outdoor sculpture, Catching Colour, will be revealed in Botanic Square, London City Island as part of the dedicated public art walking trail The Line, with the occasion marked by a specially-produced performance by dancers from English National Ballet.
Begum’s work is abstract, and makes use of light, colour and repetition to capture fleeting moments of beauty - or take advantage of them. “I’m excited to see how things will shift because even in the gallery space at Pitzhanger, you’ve got the [circular stained glass] skylight, so that’s going to be reflective and bring in a certain kind of light that changes throughout the day,” she says.
Light is a constant in Begum’s work. She grew up partly in Bangladesh and came to the UK aged eight, so she has a “quite strong memory” of her time there. Though she’s the second oldest of four (she has an older sister and two younger brothers), she was “kind of solitary” and remembers her mother “shouting at me quite a lot because I’d spend a lot of time sitting and staring into space, or the rice field or the reflective water.” She has spoken before of “reading the Quran at the local mosque, in a tiny room dappled with morning light”.
“You’d read it out loud,” she says now, “so that was something that was instilled in me, this kind of repetition.”
She wasn’t always entirely aware of these connections. Her sculpture is very inclusive and instinctive - it speaks to anyone. She started out making figurative work, but discovering abstract artists like Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin while doing her art foundation reconnected her to the inspiration of Islamic art and architecture. But “it was always my intention that I didn’t want something to be obviously representative of myself, or my culture, or political belief or religion, because it would immediately mean it’s quite enclosed. I wanted to use a language that was much more open, and I felt that gave me more freedom.”
She felt that freedom at art school, praising her teachers at Chelsea School of Art and then the Slade, but found that afterwards, people rather expected her as a woman of Bangladeshi heritage to be making a particular kind of art. “I think it was because people were struggling to connect to the work,” she says now, rather charitably.
It was probably her stunning installation made with woven baskets at the Dhaka Art Summit in 2014 - later remade at the chapel at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge - that crystallised what she was doing and gave audiences and galleries alike a way in. Invited to create a work at Dhaka, and wanting to use existing materials rather than shipping, she immediately thought of baskets.
“My Dadi [grandma] took care of me as a child and she used to weave baskets; I used to do that with her. So immediately that came into my mind, the way that light comes through the gaps [in the weave]. Actually, I didn’t even know if that was going to work. So I had to quickly order some baskets on eBay.”
It did work, certainly in Cambridge, where I saw it, a floor-to-ceiling swoop of closely-tied, near identical vessels (commissioned from traditional basket makers near Dhaka) creating an intimate but heavenly space where tiny spots of light were thrown like glitter across the floor of the little chapel. Serenity, is the impression I came away with, and since then Begum’s work has been increasingly celebrated for just this quality - its harmony, its calm, its ingenious use of natural processes (such as the inexorable shift of daylight) to create and capture beauty.
It’s only relatively recently that she has begun to make meaningful connections for herself though, through cognitive analytical therapy that she decided to embark on after suffering from postnatal depression (her children, a boy and a girl, are now 13 and 10 years old).
“I found it really interesting; it made me think about what I used to do and why. I’ve discovered things about myself, memories that I have; what they mean. There was so much space growing up in Bangladesh - it was the countryside, so I grew up surrounded by lush colours. [Before] I couldn’t really make sense of why I was kind of drawn to those things, the repetition, the light, colour. It was a really lovely connection.”
The baskets won’t be in the Pitzhanger show, but the aforementioned clouds will (in the adjacent gallery space, because it’s really not easy to suspend stuff from 18th century ceilings but some works will be dotted around the house, or placed in the surrounding gardens) alongside a series of vibrant acrylic geometric paintings on aluminium, a set of jesmonite panels that resemble miniature mountainous landscapes and a large scale wall installation of metal moulds of differing sizes and forms evoking Istanbul’s period buildings. Her first video piece will also feature, capturing the light that penetrates the woodland behind Begum’s studio as it cycles through the year of lockdown.
Work kept Begum sane during that time, when she wasn’t home-schooling her kids (she says that, like everyone else, she was “going insane), but it has always been a solace and a source of calm. The methodical research and process testing that her sculptures need can be meditative, but, she says, when all that’s done, “then there's a beautiful moment where it feels like the work is unveiled and it's just left [in the studio] to respond to everything in the space. So even though it's quite chaotic, it's there amongst all the other stuff and things that are happening, and I can see each day as I come into the studio or go out, there's a moment that [I’ll look at the finished work and] it just holds itself, and this calmness goes through you. It's just there existing.”
Want some of that inner calm? Get down to Pitzhanger and let the light wash over you.
