Megan Rooney and Rachel Cusk: Between Paint and Print A multi-disciplinary conversation on how work takes shape on the page and on the canvas
Writers and painters are both storytellers. Join two of today’s most vital artists — writer Rachel Cusk and visual artist Megan Rooney for a conversation across mediums and methods, as the two explore how images and narratives take form and shape one another.
Rooney will reflect on her process of creating characters for her paintings, while Cusk will explore her process of questioning the limits of language and turning to image-making patterns in prose. What can be gained by bridging the gulf between words and images?
About the speakers:
Rachel Cusk is the author of Parade, Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.
Megan Rooney (b. 1985, South Africa) works across a variety of media, including painting, installation and performance. Created in cycles, her paintings develop from accumulations of gesture and colour that are instinctively built up and sanded back. They become capsules of time, absorbing traces of their surrounding environments as well as the artist's own inner landscape. Often working on a large scale, painting is for Rooney as much a process of layering as it is retrieval – a physical exchange through which buried forms are gently coaxed or wrestled to the surface. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Echoes & Hours, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2024); HUSH SKY MURMUR HOLE, Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2020); Green, I Want You Green, Salzburger Kunstverein (2020–21); and Fire On The Mountain, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Her work was recently presented in the exhibition Joan Mitchell / Megan Rooney: PAINTING FROM NATURE, held at the Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing in 2025. Her works are held in public and private collections worldwide, including Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; The Arts Council Collection, London; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Baltimore Museum of Art; Ackland Museum of Art, Chapel Hill; and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, among others. Rooney lives and works in London.
