Megan Rooney's paintings are governed by the seasons The artist opened her studio to Matthew Holborn in advance of her exhibition at Kettle's Yard
By Matthew Holman
As a ten-month winter breaks into glorious summer, Matthew Holman travels to Kettle's Yard, Cambridge to speak to Megan Rooney, who has just made a gigantic four-wall mural about the seasons. The first thing he wants to find out? How a spider seduced a moth.
For 18 days during a dank and drab early June, Megan Rooney holed herself up in a large room at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and worked tirelessly to produce a mural on all four walls of their Jamie Fobert-designed gallery space. Rooney's remarkable mural is the cornerstone of her exhibition, Echoes and Hours. It is accompanied by seven wingspan paintings (gestural abstractions, at Rooney's 152cm-wide wingspan), and eight works on paper, as well as a new commission, Old Sky (Blue), 2024, hanging above sculptures by Constantin Brâncuși and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in Kettle's Yard founder Jim Ede's old house. As you first enter the space, yellow arcs and lines cascade like giant calligraphic marks, welcoming you in, while jagged fleshy-pink brushstrokes behind you suggest scuttling six-foot spiders' legs. It's all sky and ditch and bottom of the sea simultaneously. But what's the difference between a successful abstract mural and wild brushstrokes on a wall?
When I meet Rooney at the Punter pub on Pound Hill on the day of the opening, the longest day of the year, she still has a fleck of green paint on her chin. Back at the gallery, the mural is still wet. It’s baking hot, and the sun seems to be cooking the pavement. 'I’ve always talked about my paintings as governed by the seasons', she tells me, sipping on a tomato juice: 'and obviously today is the solstice; the exhibition plays with this idea of time and light, and instead of having a really hot, warm install here, like it is today, which is kind of ironic, it’s been made with heavy clouds in the sky.' Rooney tries hard to resist the temptation to attribute the shift into high summer to her (near) completion of the mural. She bites her lip. But Rooney could be forgiven for believing in some strange causality between her art and the weather outside. After all, there is an atmospheric or climatic quality to her abstract paintings, which are dramatic and full of internal tension; they sometimes feel like thunderclaps heralding a far-off storm, an overcast atmosphere or the instantaneous breaking out into scolding sunlight after torrential rain that is so familiar to the English summer.
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When I look up at the expanse of the mural’s blue, especially on its right side, it reminds me less of the sky or the ocean – although there is something of the bigness of each here – and more of a blue room, like the one recently excavated by archaeologists in Pompeii’s Regio IX in May this year. Archaeologists have determined it to be the site of a possible sacrarium, distinguished by depictions of female figures on the cerulean-painted walls. Experts believe the ornate room represents the four seasons, or ‘Horea’, and said that ‘the colour blue found in this room rarely occurs in Pompeian frescoes.’ While Rooney’s mural does not feature figures or tell stories, it has the beguiling effect of seeming to have been excavated from some deeper layer in earlier times, as though its accretions of paint are ancient and not merely a couple of weeks old. It seems only fitting that the mural will be erased when Echoes and Hours closes, once the autumn comes, in early October. If the mural tells any story, it’s that summer never lasts. Go and enjoy both before they’re gone.
Megan Rooney: Echoes and Hours, is on view at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 6 October 2024.
