Megan Rooney

A strong breeze turns the undergrowth into a violent blur. Clouds are rendered in a fast-scattering mobile sketch. Nothing is focal in this image but the wind. This has been captured by Renoir and The Gust of Wind, 1872, hanging in the classical Fitzwilliam Museum in the venerable university city of Cambridge.

It was the summer solstice when I visited. Canadian artist Megan Rooney was opening a show on the other side of town. The intention of Andrew Nairne, director of Kettle’s Yard gallery, was to allude to the city’s unusual impressionist picture. It offered a wider context to Rooney’s own windsock-like practice. And perhaps in truth, Rooney, rather than Renoir, has the real weather eye.

In the period leading up to her exhibition in the more modernist setting, storms darkened this UK region’s fenland skies. Rooney responded with an immersive mural on the ground floor of the gallery. At the vernissage sunlight from the perimeter skylight revealed an emotional climate of baby pink arcs, navy-black splatters and blackened tangles; it is perhaps also a physiological landscape of orange/green tussles and a royal blue.

Getting physical with the space and the ambient light, the artist had used a specially made brush with a broom-sized head. Next, she’d worked with an industrial sander. We, the press, are told that this installation had emerged, fortuitously, from an encounter between the artist’s body, the unadorned architecture and another piece of kit from a plant hire firm, a mobile platform known as a “cherry picker.” In changeable natural light Rooney was feeling her way around the gallery. The white cube had been bright, cheerful and sympathetic to her art; her touch could be as fleeting as a zephyr and her luminous painted realms swayed back and forth much like the scene by Renoir.

This is her sixth public mural, a format that offers liberation from the commercial considerations of putting paint on canvas. Before such a kaleidoscopic tumble, with its meteorological flavour, all visitors are equal. Not one of us can afford to own it. And the scene will return to being a pristine box once her season in the gallery has passed. All that will be left are “Echoes and Hours” (the memories, documentation and durational process that are hinted at by the full show’s title).

Overseas readers might expect a Canadian artist to express something of a feel for the outdoors. Yet Markham, Ontario, where Rooney grew up, is an urban settlement with what she describes as a nightmarish atmosphere akin to that of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, 1990–1991. Her own mother, not above a bit of small-town eccentricity, painted the exterior of Rooney’s childhood home bright pink. This ‘artwork,’ which may have been formative, became something of a local landmark. The interior life of a future artist and the civic engagement of family with the outside world came together in a creative paint job that surely marked the household’s youngest occupant.

At the heart of this exhibition are six richly coloured pictures of equal size. Each of these is 1.5 x 2-metre dimensions, which, like Vitruvian man of Renaissance design, reflect Rooney’s reach and span. Even dealing with a theme as interior as memory, her impressions are allowed to all hang out on canvas. Rooney builds an abstract scene with acrylic, pastel and oil stick as well as oil paint. In Up Comes Yesterday, 2024, for example, rouge-like colours clot like impasto blood, whereas the layers of orange and yellow offer some relief.

Lean Twilight, 2024, and Sowing Sky, 2024, may also be direct responses to lighting conditions. The former is an aqueous morass of blues and greens with dark pinks suggestive of vegetation. Gaze here for a while and it might evoke a boating experience. They have those on the river 500 metres from the gallery. And the flat-bottomed skiffs called punts do get tangled in the willows. The latter painting brings to mind the rampant plant growth of high summer. Although Cambridge is a very green city, both visions, as if seen through a kaleidoscope, are too lurid to reflect on the show’s geographical setting in a realist way.

However, both works, perhaps all the works, draw inspiration from light. The painter is aware that whether in her studio or the site of a mural, this solar manifestation draws her as it would a moth. At the same time, thanks to her evocations of light, she will snag the interested visitor like a spider. These two roles, both spider and moth, were embodied on the solstice in question by a dance. It is integral to “Echoes and Hours” that the space becomes home to a performance in which two human(oid)s present a vigorous “mating dance” to the plaintive tones of an improvised saxophone.

The intense engagement between choreographer Temi Ajose and her colleague Leah Marojevic was to begin from the very first plaintive note. The work was called Spin Down Sky, and indeed they spun. Facing, hands clasped round one another’s necks, they turned at Waltzer speed, first through the crowded gallery and then into the foyer, sending art lovers stepping out of the way in mild panic. With danger, Eros was palpable when the darkly costumed spider, having subdued her moth, beat a rhythm on her lightly costumed flank. When they intently butted heads, I swear you could hear the light thud.

Rooney herself used to be a dancer, before exchanging light limbs for visual light. She might not be the first painter to approach the application of paint as dance, and with her working in abstraction at this scale, one cannot avoid comparing her work to abstract expressionism with a measure of figuration and impressionism. But whereas Renoir offers the radical 19th-century step of painting the breeze, Rooney embodies the no less radical 21st-century stance of being the breeze.

As a result this show whips through Kettle’s Yard in a squall of colours, intense here, airy there, an abstract rendition of a landscape both interior and exterior. ❚

“Megan Rooney: Echoes and Hours” was exhibited at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK, from June 22, 2024, to October 6, 2024. Two public performances of Spin Down Sky occurred on October 5, 2024.

Mark Sheerin is a UK-based art writer and cultural historian. He has a PhD in history of art from the University of Sussex and his blog can be found at criticismism.com.