Megan Rooney’s blue fortnight

For 18 days during a dank and drab early June, Megan Rooney holed herself up in a large room at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and worked tirelessly to produce a mural on all four walls of their Jamie Fobert-designed gallery space. Rooney’s remarkable mural is the cornerstone of her exhibition, ‘Echoes and Hours’. It is accompanied by seven wingspan paintings (gestural abstractions, at Rooney’s 152cm-wide wingspan), and eight works on paper, as well as a new commission, Old Sky (Blue), 2024, hanging above sculptures by Constantin Brâncuși and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in Kettle’s Yard founder Jim Ede’s old house. As you first enter the space, yellow arcs and lines cascade like giant calligraphic marks, welcoming you in, while jagged fleshy-pink brushstrokes behind you suggest scuttling six-foot spiders’ legs. It’s all sky and ditch and bottom of the sea simultaneously. But what’s the difference between a successful abstract mural and wild brushstrokes on a wall?

When I meet Rooney at the Punter pub on Pound Hill on the day of the opening, the longest day of the year, she still has a fleck of green paint on her chin. Back at the gallery, the mural is still wet. It’s baking hot, and the sun seems to be cooking the pavement. “I’ve always talked about my paintings as governed by the seasons”, she tells me, sipping on a tomato juice: “and obviously today is the solstice; the exhibition plays with this idea of time and light, and instead of having a really hot, warm install here, like it is today, which is kind of ironic, it’s been made with heavy clouds in the sky.” Rooney tries hard to resist the temptation to attribute the shift into high summer to her (near) completion of the mural. She bites her lip. But Rooney could be forgiven for believing in some strange causality between her art and the weather outside. After all, there is an atmospheric or climatic quality to her abstract paintings, which are dramatic and full of internal tension; they sometimes feel like thunderclaps heralding a far-off storm, an overcast atmosphere or the instantaneous breaking out into scolding sunlight after torrential rain that is so familiar to the English summer.

“I think of making murals like a three-way collaboration between myself, the architecture of the space, and the forklift”, Rooney says: “but it feels like a tug of war, and the architecture has the advantage.” Rooney thrives in situations like this. She produced a kaleidoscopic orange mural at Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2022, entitled La Couleur en Fugue; Under the doggy clown hiss, composed of discordant oblongs, vertical lines and hand-like shapes was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, in 2017. It’s difficult to underestimate how grand her murals feel. This is clearly the work of an artist who has thrown themselves up and down ladders and careered about in a cherry picker, using it as a bodily appendage to move through space like a child might cycle without their hands on the handlebars. “I’m a small person with a big imagination”, Rooney says, “and there’s something about the painting cycle that means it has to be solved in such a short time… that’s the kind of thing that makes you grow as a painter, working like a dog in ten days that feels like ten years.” Whether on the canvas or on the wall, Rooney never works from preparatory sketches or test drawings; she completes her work in that mindset which businesspeople call the flow state. ‘I’m just trying to generate as much momentum as possible to get the thing off the ground’, she says, ‘because you have to launch a position to be able to get around the space in a very condensed period of time.’

I’ve been visiting Rooney’s studio, which feels like a small aircraft hangar hidden away in a corporate zone in Nine Elms, every fortnight or so over the last few months as she completes this body of work for Kettle’s Yard. The paintings gestate over this extended period, and some canvases have undergone so many revisions that they are unrecognisable from the visit before. Working with a power tool, Rooney often sands the surface of the canvas so that much of the composition itself barely looks like it was made with a paintbrush. Rooney refers to a series of works that come together for a particular exhibition as ‘families’: they have likenesses that cousins might share, some are older and some younger, and they all experience transformations. If the paintings on show at Kettle’s Yard are a family what does that make the mural? “The paintings in the studio go back and forth over the months in which they’re born”, she replies, “and the mural condenses that into a really violent 18-day marathon until the thing finds resolution, and you don’t know how you’re going to bring it home.”

Rooney, who comes from a printmaking background, is a thoroughgoing abstract artist. She is one of the leading lights of a generation of London-based painters, which also includes Pam Evelyn and Rachel Jones, who have looked back to Abstract Expressionists like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler and thought something like: ‘there’s life in making big, bold, earnest abstract paintings yet.’ It sounds nostalgic but doesn’t feel like it, especially when you spend time with the work. Rooney’s canvases have something to say, but it’s not always clear what they want to tell us. Despite being stripped of all references to the world outside – no figures or buildings or trees or horizon lines – there’s still a tremendous amount going on; they gyrate with energy and passion. But Rooney’s abstract vocabulary faces a problem when it comes to the making of murals. From the earliest times, murals, or wall paintings, were designed to tell visual stories. In the 18th century BC, the Investiture of Zimri-Lim fresco on the walls of the Royal Palace of the ancient city-state of Mari in eastern Syria narrated a king receiving his symbols of rule. In the Renaissance, Michelangelo painted the divine origin of man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. After the 1920 Mexican Revolution, Diego Rivera depicted his country’s past, present, and future in wildly ambitious history paintings as murals. In all her beautiful blues, what kind of story does Rooney want to tell us with her mural? The Kettle’s Yard mural’s subject is not kings or gods or history, but colour – and the sheer joy of summer’s arrival. This might sound naff, but who among us has not been changed – constitutively, if not physically – by the triumph of the summer?

Whatever its meaning, the mural facilitates storytelling of different kinds. To celebrate the opening night, Rooney commissioned a performance in front of the mural, which featured dancers Temi Ajose and Leah Marojevic, with musical accompaniment by saxophonist tyroneisaacstuart. “The performance is about the seduction of a night butterfly by the bolas spider”, Rooney explains: “they find a kind of unlikely union or attraction to each other, even though it’s a predator and prey scenario in which the moth is ensnared by the spider hoop which bewitches her… it’s a love story and, like the best love stories, it’s a tragedy”, Rooney responds, enigmatically. True enough, the performance itself is, at turns, violent, tender, romantic, cruel, and intimate. On opening night, spectators vie for space to watch and part like the Red Sea when the dancers advance. Ajose and Marojevic throw their legs over one another’s shoulders and hold the other in pass-out death grips. They seem to make love. It’s pure hate and pure sex at once.

When I look up at the expanse of the mural’s blue, especially on its right side, it reminds me less of the sky or the ocean––although there is something of the bigness of each here – and more of a blue room, like the one recently excavated by archaeologists in Pompeii’s Regio IX in May this year.  Archaeologists have determined it to be the site of a possible sacrarium, distinguished by depictions of female figures on the cerulean-painted walls. Experts believe the ornate room represents the four seasons, or ‘Horea’, and said that ‘the colour blue found in this room rarely occurs in Pompeian frescoes.’ While Rooney’s mural does not feature figures or tell stories, it has the beguiling effect of seeming to have been excavated from some deeper layer in earlier times, as though its accretions of paint are ancient and not merely a couple of weeks old. It seems only fitting that the mural will be erased when ‘Echoes and Hours’ closes, once the autumn comes, in early October. If the mural tells any story, it’s that summer never lasts. Go and enjoy both before they’re gone.