Megan Rooney on painting ‘You must dig it all up before you can find what it actually is’

To say Megan Rooney runs nerve-janglingly close to the wire would be an understatement. Four days before the opening of her first major exhibition in the UK, the artist took a power sander to a vast mural and rubbed it right back.

‘It felt too claustrophobic, too turbulent. The room needed more space to breathe,’ she says. She repainted it just in time — the walls were still wet at the private view. But this, she assures me, is often the case: ‘I always paint right up until the opening. It is very risky, but we are all fighting time in one way or another.’

It is this intensity that drives the 39-year-old artist, who admits to a ‘restless’ personality. Speaking over a video link from the west coast of Finland, where she is on holiday, Rooney is relieved that the show at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge has been so well received.

The exhibition consists of a wild, liberating blue mural and a magnificent ‘family group’ of gestural paintings, the freedom and ranginess of the first contrasting with the depth and concentration of the second. The exhibition also features a film of the dance performance Spin Down Sky, commissioned by the artist for the opening.

Rooney’s paintings are ravishing in their skeins of colour, balancing powdery crimsons with gold, indigo and navy-greens. They conjure an atmosphere of early summer: tangled undergrowth, shallow riverbeds and damp grass. No single painting predominates; rather, they seem to hold each other in mysterious sway.

Remarkably, the colour seems to radiate from within the canvas rather than sit on its surface, something the artist puts down to her technique of repeatedly power-sanding the layers of paint: ‘I want the colour to be absorbed, to avoid it just sitting flat, which is very unsatisfying,’ she says. ‘It has to wound or penetrate you emotionally.’