Megan Rooney's Lyrical Abstractions at Kettle's Yard Here’s How She Brings Them to Life

By Jo Lawson-Tancred

“As a foreigner, it couldn’t feel more English,” said Canadian artist Megan Rooney of her central London studio. This space is at the very top of a Victorian building formerly known as The Royal Ear, Nose, and Throat Hospital and has “a shabby balcony” overlooking Britannia Street. Rooney has a second studio, too; this one occupies a “very new pristine building” in Vauxhall, just south of the river, which offers a comparatively contemporary view of the capital. “The area around it gives me the impression I’m walking through a sketch-up model!” she said. “At any moment you could touch a wall and walk right through it. Utterly bizarre.”

Rooney is best known for her large-scale, lyrical, painterly abstract canvases. These dreamlike compositions sometimes hint at narratives, with recurring characters and motifs, but their stories remain fundamentally enigmatic. “I think of my paintings in family groups because they need a kind of sibling rivalry in order to create a feeling of tension in the studio (something to ride against),” she said.

The artist has spent the past year working on “a new family of paintings” that have just gone on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge (until October 6). The exhibition builds on recent momentum for the artist and follows her 2023 Paris exhibition “Flyer and the Seed” with Thaddaeus Ropac.

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Given the work’s ambition, as well as its occasionally unruly nature, it is not uncommon for Rooney to spend a year on one family of paintings. “You have to establish a relationship with it and for this you need time,” she said. “My paintings are like portals holding the weight of time.”

What’s it like working across two studios and how do they differ?

[At the King’s Cross studio] the light is incredible, as it pours in from all sides and this has hugely impacted the way I work as my paintings have their own unique ecosystems and sort of act as weathervanes or barometers.

I always paint from a position of motion, so I like to run to Vauxhall where my other studio is. I collect images and weather temperatures (wind, run, sun, heat) so in a way I’m already painting before I arrive. As these images and impressions lodge in my memory bank and spill out when I’m faced with a blank surface.

Just a short five-minute walk away [from the Vauxhall studio], you get a good bit of London where the original fruit and veg/flower market is. The place is buzzing with activity and color. I wander around and look at enormous containers brimming with bright orange carrots; the next one is full of pale green cabbages or electric lemons and so on. In a way, it’s like walking through a colossal painting. So I go there almost every day, drink a coffee with the food packers, and steal some images for my memory bank.

For your new show at Kettle’s Yard, you painted in situ. Was it strange to be pulled out of your usual studio space? 

My studio is also mobile! I paint on trains, in cafes, and always in hotel rooms. A few months ago, I started making small works on paper that I refer to as sidewalk paintings made spontaneously when I see something that moves me or catches my attention (a bird in flight, a bit of exploded trash, a wonky tree pushing the concrete sidewalk out around, a wailing baby, a woman’s silk dress blowing in the wind, a reclining figure emerging between the trees). I’m always trying to get the outside [world] in paintings. Then of course my memory acts as a kind of umbilical cord between what I see and what slips out onto the canvas.

I’ve been making a colossal 360-degree wall painting inside Kettle’s Yard. It’s risky because I do not work with preparatory sketches; it’s not ‘paint by numbers.’ I spend a lot of time tracking in the space (by that I mean moving). I come from a dance background, so it’s important to feel how my body responds to the architecture. I think of my murals as a kind of three-way informal collaboration between my body, the forklift, and the architecture, which is always unique to the space (my last public mural was with Frank Gehry; this time it’s Jamie Fobert!) Radically different!