Colour historian Alexandra Loske in conversation with artist Rana Begum

Rana Begum is busy working on several projects, some of them large-scale, including one in Houston, Texas, at the Ismaili Centre (designed by British architect Farshid Moussavi) and another in Oulu, Finland. She also has two solo shows coming up in September, one in Dubai, and her first one in New York. Closer to home, some of Rana’s work will soon be installed in Eastbourne (commissioned by Towner Eastbourne), and you can currently see one of her pieces at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. There are projects coming up in London, too, and large work has been created for the wild botanic gardens at Kew Wakehurst, as part of Henry Moore and more, which showcases four Henry Moore sculptures alongside new work by contemporary artists (June 5 to May 23, 2027).

When the invitation to interview Rana came up, I was keen to hear more about the piece for Kew Wakehurst, what inspired her to become an artist, and how her art is made. When I first saw her work in 2021 at Kate MacGarry’s gallery in London, I had a strong emotional response to it, possibly intensified by the fact that we had just come out of Covid lockdowns: I entered a plain, white, cube-like gallery space that Rana had filled with what looked like pastel-coloured clouds of light. You could get close to them, walk under them, watch their colours and shapes shift and change as you moved through the gallery. They seemed transparent and weightless, but were made of powder-coated steel mesh, crumpled into organic shapes, suspended from the ceiling. To me, they were a revelation: here was an artist who had made clouds tangible, had turned the concept of layered watercolour painting into sculpture, and had found a way of blurring the boundaries between material and immaterial colour, between paint and coloured light. Naturally, I was excited to have the chance to hear from the artist herself about what colour, light, form, transparency, and materiality mean to her. You could say it was a meeting of two chromatic minds, with a fascinating mixture of hues.

Alexandra Loske: Tell me a little bit about your background. How did you become an artist?

Rana Begum: I came to the UK when I was eight years old, in 1985. I didn’t know what art was, growing up in Bangladesh. I couldn’t speak English when I started school in the UK, so when I had difficulty doing the coursework, I turned to pencils, paper and colouring pens. I drew a lot of memories of Bangladesh, and this became a way for me to communicate and integrate, and I realised that I was interested in art. I had amazing teachers who supported this passion. After I finished my GCSEs, I started thinking that I wanted to be an artist.

AL: So you began with figurative drawings of memories. How would you describe your art now?

RB: It’s always a bit difficult, but the way I describe it is that I’m a visual artist. I work with colour, light and form. These are the three things that coexist within my work. And I would say it’s abstract, architectural, and sculptural.

AL: Were there any artists who particularly inspired you?

RB: Yes, among them Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Mary Martin and a lot of Constructivist artists. It really made sense for me when I saw their work: I knew that this was the direction that I wanted to go in, and realised I wasn’t really interested in the figurative. It also explained my fascination with Islamic art and architecture.

AL: Can you tell me more about your Kew Wakehurst piece, which is indeed non-figurative?

RB: I’m really excited about it. It’s one of the largest works I’ve ever made, about 14 metres in length. I collaborated with the structural engineer Steve Webb on this work, as well as other public art sculpture, which has allowed me to be really ambitious. It is responding to the site, and obviously the Henry Moore and more exhibition as well. I am using material that I have not used before, a kind of welded mesh fence. It is also a contrast to the Henry Moore sculptures in terms of weight, volume and presence. Wakehurst’s landscapes and plants are very beautiful, absolutely gorgeous, something that shifts and changes as well, so it can be quite intimidating.

AL: It’s interesting that you said ‘intimidating’. Is this a fear of landscape and nature?

RB: Yes, I think it can be, when it’s so beautiful. It’s a fear of destroying or interfering with something perfect. I am wary of adding something that could destroy, or have an impact on the environment. Especially in the current time, I am very conscious of having an impact on nature.

AL: How did you make the Wakehurst piece?

RB: It is made from off-the-shelf mesh fencing that you can get in specific colours. And the pieces are basically just assembled and can be disassembled and reused, almost like a flat-pack idea. I love the fact that it’s not creating a lot of waste. The foundation of the piece is made from wood sourced from Wakehurst’s landscape.

AL: Were you able to choose the spot for your work?

RB: Yes, but I’ve changed it once. The initial site was very open but also there were a lot of wildflowers. We realised that it was going to have an impact, so I moved the location to a different position, on a slope. Now you get a view of it without it having an impact on the meadow.

AL: And you can also walk around it? I imagine that it has an oscillating quality that is typical of your work?

RB: Yes, exactly. It will shift and change at different times of day. The connection with the work will vary depending on how you approach it.

AL: What is the emotional or sensory response you hope visitors will have from this particular work?

RB: The work is about spending time immersed in nature. I want people to be able to slow down, put down their phones, enjoy their surroundings, and pause. I hope they do respond to it, whether it’s in a negative or a positive way. Generating a reaction generally is important. You can’t really understand the work without the landscape, and therefore you end up engaging with both. I think it’s really important that it pushes people to get a different perspective on what is around them.

AL: What about the fact that it is a kind of fence? Do you have worries that it could be interpreted as a barrier?

RB: Yes, well, this is it. The material makes lot of political references, and in recent times everything has become heightened in terms of barriers and fencing and division and how we see the world or how we are able to move around. This artwork divides, it separates, but at the same time, it’s quite beautiful and ephemeral. This is not new, artists responding to what is happening, politically and environmentally. After all, Henry Moore was a war artist who processed the time he was living in through various mediums. I feel we cannot ignore what is happening around us.

AL: How different is it for you to work in a gallery to creating outdoor pieces? Do you have a preference?

RB: I love working in different environments; it pushes your work and challenges you. Public art is, I would say, more exciting because you get viewers who you wouldn’t normally reach. It’s a completely different kind of experience to what you get in a gallery. To show my work in that context and see people engage with it is really important to me.

AL: For me personally, your work has a lot to do with sight, light and colour. Your spray-painted dot canvases moved me so much because they reminded me of my extreme shortsightedness when I was a child. I am also fascinated by your mesh clouds, which seem to dissolve the physical boundaries of light and form. But even when I look at your hard-edged works, for example your very geometrical reflector sculpture, they still reflect light, and therefore immaterial colour. Do you have an interest in colour theory?

RB: I spent a few years in the early part of my research exploring colour but decided to take a practical approach to colour theory. I would say that I have an instinctive approach to colour – just testing and trying it out, to see how one colour has an impact on the other. I’ve been creating paintings on MDF for a few years where I layer one colour over another, to see how they interact and how a third layer of colour and geometry are created. It’s an ongoing series that I’m now developing into a textile form. Even in the Wakehurst piece there is a layering of panels, and that impacts on the colours and their intensity. It’s amazing how light can shift and change things and how it allows the work to change over time. That subtle change is something I’ve always been interested in.

AL: Can you talk me through the process of creating one of your organic-looking mesh sculptures like the one currently at Pallant House Gallery?

RB: I sometimes have swatches or use the RAL code to select colours. The mesh gets cut and then goes to the powder coaters. When it comes back to the studio, we form it by hand. So, you press and mould shapes and then join them together with steel wire. Each form has an internal form as well. And that’s how you can play with colour and be more instinctive and really push colour relationships with each form. Sometimes the mesh forms are intense, sometimes really dark, at other times light and pastel-coloured. I wanted that freedom of things to happen, something that you see naturally in the city or in the countryside – an unexpected interaction of colour.

Henry Moore and more will run from Friday June 5 – May 23 2027 at Kew Wakehurst, near Ardingly in West Sussex. Meanwhile, Henry Moore: Monumental Nature has already opened to the public at Kew Gardens and runs until Sunday 31 January 2027.