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.’

To this end, Rooney likens her process to excavation. She recalls working on a large mural in Salzburg, Austria, in 2020, while the street was being dug up outside: ‘Everyone was irritated by the mess, the constant noise, dirt and dust flying about, but I found a kinship with the construction workers. We share the common goal of transformation. Sometimes you must dig up the whole block to get to the part that is leaking, and by doing so you uncover this whole other world. This is so close to how I paint. You must dig it all up before you can find what it actually is.’

She describes the paint as an almost living thing, with its own spirit or ‘voodoo’, and credits the landscape of her upbringing across three continents as inspiration.

Megan Rooney was born in South Africa in 1985. Her family emigrated to Brazil when she was a child, and later to Canada. It was an outdoor existence. Her mother was an avid gardener, and one of her earliest memories, echoed in the exhibition Green, I Want You Green at Salzburger Kunstverein in 2020, was of her mother’s dense, verdant garden beneath the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. She studied film, painting and printmaking at the University of Toronto, then moved to London to do an MA in fine art at Goldsmiths College.

Her journey to abstraction emerged from her printmaking practice. ‘Etching is a close approximation to my canvases,’ she says. ‘As a printmaker, I used to work on a single plate repeatedly until it disintegrated because I had burnt it so many times.’

She had her breakthrough in 2018, with the J.D. Salinger-inspired group exhibition Childhood: Another banana day for the dream-fish at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in which she used large brushes and a forklift machine to paint a mural in a space the size of a football pitch. ‘I was in an awkward in-between phase, doing slightly naive, childlike paintings, with this explosive painterly colour brewing in the background,’ she recalls.

A year later, at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, she presented her first ‘family group’, 15 abstract works painted in a cycle of activity: ‘Together with the Palais de Tokyo mural, I thought, “OK, this is mine, I can go somewhere with this.”’ Soon after, she was taken on by the Austrian gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac and had her first show at his London site in 2021.

She describes the ‘family group’ paintings as siblings, with their own petty rivalries: ‘I like to create a Christmas dinner scenario, with all these crazy people round the table.’ She agrees with Philip Guston, who said that the canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. ‘As a painter, you have to play for both sides,’ she says. ‘Inflict the wounds, and then carefully mend and repair them.’

It takes her about a year to complete a family group. ‘Usually there is a front-runner and others clamouring behind, but inevitably it’s a different one that emerges as the stronger in the end,’ she says. She is sceptical of the process if it goes too fast: ‘It is like the literary development of a character — things have to happen to them, they have to fail, have their heart broken. That takes time.’

The paintings that don’t make it into the final exhibition become the basis of her next family group: ‘That way, when I go back into the studio, I don’t have the hallucinatory experience of being confronted with an empty space and wondering “Where did everybody go?”’

That development continues with the murals, which are, in many ways, an extension of her paintings, enabling the colour to escape the frame and surround the viewer, creating their own imaginary space in an infinite work of art. Usually painted in a frenetic burst of activity over a two-week period using house paint and a forklift, the murals liberate the artist from the intensity of the family groups.

Speaking about the blue turbulence of Echoes & Hours, Rooney says that her murals are influenced by the weather: ‘During the 18-day install at Kettle’s Yard, the UK experienced the wettest spring on record. All that heavy rain, wild wind and dramatic changing light had a huge impact on the mural.’

When the exhibition finishes in October, the mural will be painted over, in an act the artist considers ‘very democratic — it’s painting for everybody’. Is it difficult to watch her work being destroyed? ‘Yes, I suffer that loss, but I like the way it relates to life. Some aspects of life are fleeting and ephemeral, they pass through you, never to return. No one can own or possess them.’

Megan Rooney: Echoes & Hours is at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, UK, until 6 October 2024