Megan Rooney: Echoes & Hours Solo exhibition at Kettle's Yard
“I imagine myself in flight when I am painting, hovering above the surface and searching for places to land, touching down and lifting off. I do this again and again until the surface starts to collect information... The painting becomes a capsule, holding the weight of time.” – Megan Rooney
Kettle’s Yard is delighted to present ‘Megan Rooney: Echoes & Hours’, the first major solo exhibition in the UK by Megan Rooney (b. 1985, South Africa). Running from 22 June – 6 October 2024, the exhibition will feature entirely new work, including a series of interrelated paintings on canvas, a collaborative dance performance and a site-specific mural, marking the first time an artist has painted directly onto the walls of the galleries at Kettle’s Yard.
Rooney’s sensuous and compelling paintings reinvigorate the power of abstraction. They embody a sense of boundless energy and life, whilst reflecting the artist’s deep knowledge of painting and the potential of each viewer’s encounter. Created in ‘family groups’, the size of the canvases she uses are determined by the reach of her outstretched arms. Vibrant colour and gesture combine in dense, apparently infinite layers. Each work captures the ebb and flow of Rooney’s process, from repetitive overpainting to the use of abrasives to remove pigment.
‘Megan Rooney: Echoes & Hours’ will unfold over three chapters, opening with a new family of works that embody the artist’s fascination with weather patterns. As colours chase one another between canvases, splashes of viridian green and alizarin orange will intersperse with lemon yellow and ultramarine, perhaps suggesting a swelling storm, a mossy path or a city cast in winter light, though each mark is ambiguously referential. Her slow, yet restless process of painting over several months will reveal these landscapes in flux, enlivened in the gallery by each visitor’s path.
In the adjoining space, Rooney will create a temporary mural which will expand slowly from floor to ceiling as she paints over the course of three weeks. Interested in the human desire to leave a mark, however transient, Rooney considers wall painting to be an extension of her performative practice, igniting an informal collaboration between her body, the architecture and the scissor lift she uses to reach high heights. Here the artist will work without a preparatory sketch, responding to subtle changes in temperature, sound and natural light, which filter through a skylight in the gallery space. Visitors will be fully immersed in colour: transformations will rise and collapse, giving way to layer upon layer of marks, traces, stains and scratchings that, together, create a vital, yet impermanent, final image. Embodied experience has been consistently important to Rooney’s work. The body, as she suggests, is both ‘the subjective starting point and the final site for the sedimentation of experiences’ explored through her practice. The final chapter of the exhibition will take the form of a performance, narrating the unlikely relationship between a moth and a spider – symbolic characters that hold personal significance for the artist. Two performances will take place throughout the exhibition’s run, choreographed by Temitope Ajose-Cutting, with costume design by Rooney herself and a new sound composition by tyroneisaacstuart.
