There is a video on YouTube of one of the lectures of the late Liverpool-born mathematician John Conway.[1] It starts in the lecture theatre at Princeton. We see him at the blackboard, where he is explaining to his students how rotating a brick in different orientations changes the way you can lay it. He shows the variations – stretcher, header, soldier, sailor – and how these different orientations are combined to form different kinds of bonds: Running, Stack, English, Dutch, American, Flemish and so on. He draws these different brick / bond arrangements on the blackboard. Then he writes the mathematical formulae that expresses them – 0.5H x B for the Dutch bond for example. But then walks away from the front of the stage, to the wall of the room, which happens to be brick; pointing and explaining the structure and assemblage of these bricks. That’s not enough. He opens the door and leads his class outside, his enthusiasm for the subject apparently uncontainable. The students troop behind him as he walks around the campus, gathering them around him at intervals to examine sections of brickwork in the doorways or on the outside of different buildings, to observe and parse the mathematics of brick laying. Through Conway’s eyes, we see these basic, unremarkable building-blocks in our everyday environment differently. Suddenly the arrangements of bricks become patterns, rhythms and logics. We see how a simple single unit is placed, and stacked into assemblages that obey the complex rules of assembly. ‘How to Stare at a Brick Wall’ is what Conway called that talk, a title that combines the abstract distraction of staring, with an instruction manual on ‘how to’. It suggests that the most mundane objects can reveal or embody the most interesting and intricate phenomena.
Rana’s works evoke something similar. They resonate with architectural ideas but, free from the practicalities that so often subsume architecture, they are able to perform differently. Making architecture often means assembling a range of pre-fabricated components into a building form. Read an architect’s specification and you’ll find a shopping list of building products. Watch the activity on a construction site and you’ll see bricks arrive stacked on pallets, sheets delivered in standard sizes, timber pre-cut into modular dimensions and so on. All this gets piled, stacked, fixed and otherwise assembled. By the time the project is finished, all the intelligence and logic – of both the designer and builder, in arranging and assembling – is subsumed by the whole. With Rana’s work though, the acts of arrangement remain visible. Her precise assembly of different components creates both form and space, while also displaying the logics of arrangement. Her techniques of stacking and layering sit – like Conway’s walls – between material reality and abstract logic.
Take Rana’s structures formed of baskets (e.g. No 473, 2014). What is initially remarkable is that she recognises that the basket can operate in a different way to that which we expect. Not as a single autonomous object, but as a module. Baskets (now multiple rather than singular) act like bricks – as elements for repeated modular construction. Their specific individual formal properties generate a logic of assembly, to become a singular structure. Her act of making is a process of uncovering possibilities of assembly – how one basket can be fixed to another; how the circumference of one rim can meet another; how parts become a whole.
Her analysis of the original object reveals something utterly transformational, yet already inherent in the ‘found’ craft object. As the geometry of the singular object multiplies into a structure, it creates something that is both wild and cave-like, yet constrained by a tight, closely observed geometrical logic. Occupying the space that is created we experience that Conway moment – the oscillation between the singular and the multiple, between the basket and the basket-space.
This same transformation happens when the module used is a more familiar construction material, the sort of thing we see so often, that we hardly register as an entity in itself. Take Rana’s assemblages of traditional terracotta curved roof tiles, stacked into pyramidal form, or her arrangements of coloured reflectors into large graphic surfaces. Both use objects almost as intended, but through the absolute precision of their arrangement they produce an entirely different outcome. A pyramid of roof tiles (No. 815) becomes part archetypal pitched roof, part screen wall, and yet at the same time it is also a sharp geometric shape that is outside of the language of typical construction – as if the rustic tile contains within its own form a purer mathematical potential. This tension between abstraction and representation is even more present in Rana’s reflector works. Using products designed for traffic management, and with chevrons and zigzags borrowed from roadside graphics, Rana’s super-graphic pieces in the public space (No. 700 Reflectors) become a kind of pop-pattern – recognisable yet simultaneously transformed into an abstract singularity. At this size, the flatness of the work’s surface subsumes you into the space of the graphic. Whatever the medium, Rana’s work, is about space. Even when the work itself is flat, or takes the form of a small work on paper, its lines and shapes are always aware of their position in space.
In architectural drawings, lines have a specific meaning. We don’t look at architectural drawings, we read them. Their codes, symbols and conventions are a language that always refers to the buildings they describe. These structures do not share the graphic qualities of the drawn lines, and register instead in the physical world at a different scale – made with different materials, speaking to different sensibilities, and fulfilling different uses. Rana’s drawings are similarly about space but they retain their drawn quality, even as they become material and spatial. It is as if the codes of architectural drawing are bypassed to allow the space of the page to expand outwards towards the space of the wall, and then out into the room. As they do this, her drawn lines seem to ask: Can a room be imagined as a page? Is a page also a space? Her drawings seem always to want to escape the flatness of two dimensions. Sometimes this happens through a disruption of the traditional two-dimensional picture plane. In works like No 894 (2019) the flat plane is folded, in others, like No 957 (2019) it seems crumpled. This manipulation of flatness accentuates our awareness of the surface. The works transform the idea of the page from a space within which representation occurs – into a site in itself – where the surface is the representation.
In some of her other works, flatness is used directly to create non-flat experiences. Take No. 814 (2018) where sheets of translucent coloured glass are layered one in front of the other. As we move around, the colour overlaps shift to create different mixes of colour, and variations of transparency and opacity. Here it is the very flatness of the glass sheets arranged in three-dimensional space that is key. The planes of colour are animated by our movement in space around them.
In all these works, where Rana reveals flatness as a phenomenon with rich spatial qualities.
We become acutely aware of the two-dimensional surface as three dimensional space. In other works, [No. 626 L Drawing, 2015] it is as if the drawn line itself becomes spatial, peeling away from the page and escaping into the space beyond. Free from that containment, these lines evolve into autonomous entities.
Unlike architectural lines, Rana’s translations of the graphic sensibility of drawing into three-dimensions, explore the possibilities of a line as a physical object. They take on qualities of colour, texture and transparency but perhaps most of all, they register for us as spatial. Their position in relation to each other, to the wall, to the viewer, and to the space they inhabit, is an intrinsic part of the work. The space between the elements in her work and their context becomes charged; the effect of their physicality being key to their performance. Gaps, shadows, reflections and the transmission of light all become heightened phenomena. The spatial, physical and architectural possibilities of a line are crystallised by Rana with absolute precision, and while her works operate as visual phenomenon, they also exert their forces outwards onto us. If the work itself is hyper-self-aware of its arrangement in space, that sensibility is transmitted to us, heightening our own sensation of space. We become more aware of our own position in relation to the work; to the space around it and us. We become momentarily conscious of our own bodies as objects in space. If drawings are a moment captured in time, Rana’s work makes that moment into an event that we experience, and become part of.
Her works with grids are another exploration of how the qualities of drawing develop into enveloping spatial entities. Coloured grids are overlaid on each other in a series of prints. We can read both the original grids and then, as they shift and slip, we take in the interference patterns and optical effects. The colours seem to change, and densities start to vary across the field of the page so that the original cartesian simplicity becomes variegated. If we read the grid in its cartesian origin, it is an assertion of an idealised, abstract idea of a flat plane. Yet here the interactions of her grids hint at depth, shadow and other sensations of three dimensionality. The picture plane seems to flicker between states: flat graph paper, then suddenly a space within which the grids float. Rana works with grids also as physical structures and in these iterations the grid works are formed with coloured mesh panels that are assembled into free standing assemblages. Sometimes they stand with space around them, and at others they are arranged as more enveloping installations that the viewer can walk through.
The graphic quality of these grids, amplified by colour, operate like a form of hatching. Usually this technique is used to suggest light and shade within the representational space of the page, and to give the impression of depth on a flat plane. Released from the role of depicting of a subject, and freed into space, the positioning of one grid over another forms layers of varying intensity.
As the viewer moves around or through these assemblages, the densities keep shifting. The materiality of the structures she creates seems to ebb and flow, more like a mist than something solid. Her translation of a graphic technique into spatial form evokes ethereal sensations and layering these grids in space creates a kind of three-dimensional hatch, constructing non-material, shadowlike forms. Just as the drawn grids create an ambiguity between flatness and depth on the picture plane, these works in space use the mesh – often a material used to fence things in – so that it becomes something porous. The idea of a wall or barrier is exploded into a more ambiguous formation where the edge is blurred and the definition of interior and exterior is atomised.
Much of Rana’s work explores ideas that are fundamentally architectural. But like John Conway staring at a brick wall, she suggests possibilities of arrangement, assembly, and the production of space that architecture itself bypasses in its rush to translate drawing to building. By slowing down and working precisely through the inherent logic of each process, on paper or as models and installations, she is able to focus on specific relationships. She draws out viewpoints that exist between the graphic and the spatial to reveal unexpected nuances between the usual categories of flatness, relief, object and space. Rana’s work reveals phenomena already present in the world. It brings these into sharper relief, whether they lie between the material and geometric worlds, between representational and real space, or between found material and abstraction. Through dialogues between these apparently opposing phenomena, conducted with precise clarity she creates fields of abstract pleasure and experience – and in so doing, manifests new possibilities of what space itself might be.
[1]John Conway, The Princeton Brick lecture https://youtu.be/dVpydmTqfNw
First published in Rana Begum: Space Light Colour