Rising Painter Megan Rooney's Color-Soaked Canvases Are Taking Centre Stage Interview with the artist at Kettle's Yard
By Gabrielle Schwarz
There were still patches of wet paint on the walls when Megan Rooney’s exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, “Echoes and Hours,” opened to the press on June 21st. For 18 days straight, the artist had been working in one of the galleries on a mural: a palimpsest of colors and gestures, repeatedly sanded back and then painted over again, covering the walls from floor to ceiling. Three cherry-picker forklifts—the machines kept breaking down—had been enlisted to reach the necessary heights. On opening night, this massive painting, which shares its title with the exhibition, was to serve as the backdrop for a new performance, Spin Sky Spin (2024), developed by Rooney in collaboration with choreographer Temitope Ajose-Cutting and jazz saxophonist Tyrone Isaac-Stuart.
The past few years have brought a string of professional successes for Rooney, from museum shows at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and MOCA Toronto to gallery representation with Thaddaeus Ropac. Yet this is the artist’s first institutional show in England, where she lives (she completed an MA in fine art at Goldsmiths in London in 2011 and has kept studios in the city ever since). When we sat down for an interview in a back office of the gallery, she explained that she wanted to take the opportunity here to show work in “media that are very important to me, but not always that easy to do in the commercial world.” The mural, like others made for venues such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, will be painted over after the show.
But Rooney is also displaying more permanent work at Kettle’s Yard: densely layered and vividly pigmented canvases, most of them measuring 200 by 150 centimeters to mirror her own arm span, as well as smaller painted sketches on paper. She is adept at changing formats, methods, and speeds. The paper works were completed in quick bursts while Isaac-Stuart was over at her studio recording music. These canvases evolved very gradually, shedding and accreting layers of color over the course of the year.
Rooney never has an image in mind for a work before she starts. Her art is a response to the world around her, from the immediate environment to farflung events. She’d assumed the mural, for instance, would be dominated by the fiery tones of summer: red, orange, yellow. But the U.K. has had one of the wettest and stormiest Junes on record. While working, Rooney was also captivated by reports of the discovery of a rare “blue room,” an ancient sacrarium, in Pompeii.
And so, the “yellow ended up being chased out by blue.” (Rooney has a lovely way with words.) Then, at the last moment, she decided to remove most of the detailing on the back wall to create more space for the performance—a duet depicting a love story between a moth and a bolas spider. Rooney explained that spiders always seem to “show up in specific moments during installs”—in the corner of a room, on a roll of canvas. The moth symbolizes the artist herself: “I think of myself as in flight when I’m painting.”
