Rising Painter Megan Rooney’s Color-Soaked Canvases Are Taking Center Stage at Kettle’s Yard

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.”

For Rooney, it all started with her mother, Moira: “I definitely owe my ‘making eyes’ to my mother and the way that I was reared as a child.” Rooney was born in 1985 in South Africa, but after a stint in Brazil, her family settled in a suburban city just north of Toronto in Canada. Moira painted the exterior of the house flamenco pink, and took her children to scrap yards to scavenge materials for sculptures or leftover paint tins. The young Rooney made her first murals on the veranda. “And I painted my bedroom different colors to see what it felt like to sleep in different colors,” she said. “Sleeping in peach cobbler was very different from dove gray or Naples yellow. I had a black room at one point, but that did not last very long.” At a young age, her intensely personal relationship to color and paint was already established.

Yet, she said, “It has taken me damn close to 10 years to find my own language on the surface.” After enrolling in art history as an undergraduate the University of Toronto, Rooney transferred to the visual arts program, where, under the mentorship of master printmaker George Hawken, she became “enthralled” by the “voodoo” of intaglio printmaking. Eventually the technical process, which uses acid to create incisions that hold ink on a plate, grew cumbersome and she returned to the canvas. But the idea of working “in reverse” stuck with her, inspiring her technique of removing paint with abrasives—or sometimes cutting into it—before overpainting.

Over time, Rooney’s work has also gradually become less figurative (her earliest canvases, she told me, had a Lucian Freud vibe). “The body somehow got buried,” as she put it. But as far as she is concerned, her paintings are still not abstract: They are firmly rooted in the all-too-real “complexity of the world,” its beauty and its ugliness. As an example, she cited to me her preoccupation with the weather, which has become increasingly unpredictable due to global warming.

The paintings guide the way

Rooney doesn’t think of her art as a career; it’s a way of life. Her work process is “monastic,” she said: “I paint almost every day, almost all day, if I can help it.” There is also a spiritual aspect to how she describes the creation of her paintings, as something outside her control. “The painting develops its own personhood, it starts to tell you what it needs, what it wants, who it is,” she said. “It’s like a character in a story; you’re the author but the character is somehow alive. It’s pretty mysterious.”

Fittingly, then, Rooney often refers to her groups of paintings as “families.” In the show at Kettle’s Yard, the piece that took the longest to complete—Up Comes Yesterday (2024), a canvas dominated by murky green and dark purple with splotches of pale blue and flecks of bright orange, somewhat reminiscent of Claude Monet’s waterlilies—is the “matriarch.”

“The last phase of the painting’s life is when I title it,” Rooney said. “Usually it’s something to do with the time of day or what has manifested in it.” She will have examined every layer of the painting in her mind, deciding whether anything needs to be added or subtracted. When there is nothing left to be done, she lets go.

Seeing the works again, gathered together in a show, is a strange feeling. She is reluctant to take the credit for the paintings. “It’s actually quite funny, when I look at them in the room, I think ‘Wow, yeah, you did it!’ Like, they did it.” Her own role becomes that of stewarding the paintings: helping them out by communicating about them to the rest of the world. How, then, does she measure her own success? “My only real goal as a painter is that people would linger with the work,” she said.