"I kind of describe them as relief pieces," says Rana Begum of her new work at The Third Line. "It's between painting and sculpture." She might add: "and animation". Despite not having any moving parts, Begum's abstract compositions incorporate motion as fully as they do colour and shape. "It's very important for the viewer. They have to kind of move around to see the work at its full potential," the artist explains. "There's no one point where you see the work and that's it."
The show's title is The Moment of Alignment, a fancy name for the phenomenon that Begum aims to capture: the second when, in her own repeated phrase: "something just comes together" - when disordered elements in one's field of vision snap into a regular pattern. The Bangladeshi-via-London artist has been celebrating this kind of accidental harmony for several years now, typically via large striped canvases and primary-coloured metal sculptures: think road hazard markings designed by Paul Smith and you won't be far off.
Her new show narrows the field of investigation. Depth is restricted; surfaces are broken; the range of possible vantage points has been whittled down so that the viewer is more than ever in the artist's hands. Alignment may indeed be momentary, but Begum makes sure it happens. "There's so many ways of exploring form and colour," she says. "This show was just really becoming more focused on those things that I was interested in. But it wasn't about getting rid of certain things. It was about saying how I could explore something much more clearly."
Its core is a series of large, wall-mounted installations, each one made of a dozen or so aluminium bars grouped vertically into canvas-sized squares. The bars' angled surfaces are spray-painted to a factory-smooth finish. Each facet bears a slice of a large, slanting pattern. As the viewer walks in front of the works, coloured diamonds, stripes and partitions appear, jagged at first and then drifting into line. Then they vanish, rather like the images on an old mechanical billboard, carved into strips and pasted on its revolving spindles. Unlike the billboards, however, Begum's designs don't lead the imagination through the surface of the image into another scene; they allow it to settle on the geometries of the mechanism itself. "I like the way that the image is constantly changing as you walk around," she says. "Repetition and symmetry, kind of coming together."
Begum's progress to this level of abstraction and focus was gradual. She arrived in the UK in 1985, aged eight and speaking little English. "When I first came to the country," she recalls, "one way of communicating would be drawing things. When I had to sit in class and I wouldn't understand what was going on, I'd be given pencils and paper to draw. And I guess that's how it all started." She was given lots of encouragement: "Everything I did used to go up on to the wall. Everyone would be really excited about my work."
She began by drawing people, and carried on that way for about a decade. "Even when I was doing my foundation course, I was interested in the figurative," she says. "But when you look at my drawing, the aspects that I'm interested in now are in my earlier work. Like the way I used to draw, it would be kind of using line a lot to describe things... I was interested in the figure in a more architectural way."
Perhaps it's remarkable that the transition from figure to abstraction took so long. For one thing: "My parents weren't very excited about me doing figurative work," Begum says. "If I wanted to continue as an artist, it had to be something that they would be happy with. But I still continued, and I'd hide my work under the bed." She laughs wryly. "Even though there was pressure from the family not to be doing figurative work, I didn't want that pressure to affect the work. I wanted the work to develop on its own." In fact, it's an open question how far Begum has really embraced non-representational art. She credits the Islamic decorative traditions as an influence, but at the same time insists that her work derives from observations of the urban environment. "I love the order that you sometimes see in the city, and those kind of things have a huge effect on my work," she says.
Along with the large installations, the new show includes several works on paper. They look humble beside the sleek metal pieces - dry runs for the finished works. "After my little boy was born," Begum recalls (her son is one), "I kind of suddenly panicked and thought, I really need to work. And really wanted to kind of get the work to flow. So I started doing some paper studies." These are formally similar to their aluminium counterparts: corrugated surfaces and shifting patterns. "The paper works gave me the flexibility of playing with colour and form at the same time," Begum says, "two things that I've been really interested in for a long time, and couldn't really make work well enough. And when I was making the paper pieces, it really seemed to come together and I wanted to explore that on a larger scale."
Her works with paper are just a few centimetres across. The grown-up versions measure roughly a metre and a half by a metre and a half. Begum is tempted to rework her designs on a grander scale still. "When you look at it, it can seem like it could be much bigger," she says. "It could be something that's almost like a section taken out of something much larger, a larger work." There might be a downside to expanding. "I'm quite a small person," she says with a laugh, "so I've always had the problem where I've made really large works that I can't actually carry around myself." Aluminium, lightweight and resilient, allowed Begum to work on a larger scale than many other media. "It was a material that I became really excited about," she says, "that I could use without being constrained." She was also attracted to its pristine, machine-like finish. "I love that kind of industrial quality, because the work is also about kind of the city and the urban environment. I guess the materials I use also kind of relate to that in a lot of ways as well."
London, Begum, insists, is a major influence on her work. "I love living in this city," she says. "I love the chaos. If you look at a street with loads of shops and businesses, and you look at the kind of colours that are used to promote whatever they're about, you think: 'Oh my God!' No one takes into consideration their neighbours, and it's just a bit of a mishmash... It's amazing how one colour would work with something else."
Begum credits her partner, the artist Nathaniel Rackowe, with opening her eyes to such accidental inspirations. "It was originally Nathaniel who got me looking at things around me," she says. "He was somebody who was really interested in kind of seeing what was around him. And it was after meeting him, after I first met him, that I became more and more interested in what was round me, and the colours that I was seeing around me."
It appears that this sensitivity may be contagious. "It's quite funny," says Begum. "A lot of my friends that have seen my work, they would see something in the street and I'd get photos or e-mails sent to me saying: Look! This is what I just saw! Isn't this really cool?' People, after they've seen my work, start to notice things that they wouldn't normally notice." For the uninitiated, the moment of alignment might also prove a moment of discovery.
The Moment of Alignment is at The Third Line gallery in Dubai from Thursday until Oct 1. elake@thenational.ae