Paul Rooney (artist)

Biography

Paul Rooney studied at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating with an MFA in 1991. He practised as a painter until 1998, during which period he was resident at the British School at Rome. He was also a founder member of the artist's group Common Culture and made object-based, photographic and video works with them (David Campbell, Mark Durden, and for a time, Anna Vickery) from 1996 to 2002, showing at EAST International in 1999 and at Tate Liverpool in 2002. In 1998 his solo practice shifted from painting to music, with the Rooney band project (which ended in 2000, after which a US band started using the name), exploring the relationship between music and everyday life.

During the 2000s, Paul Rooney's solo art practice — primarily sound work but also including video and writing — developed through a period of residencies and fellowships at institutions in the UK and abroad, including Tate Liverpool and Oxford University, and through commissions for organisations such as Sound and Music and Film and Video Umbrella. His practice evolved towards exploring the difficulties inherent in the representation of 'place', permeated as it is with the traces of subjective memory, shared mythologies and historical remembrance that fitfully make themselves present. The curator Claire Doherty wrote that: "Rooney asserts [the] occupation of place through real and fictional occurrences, acknowledging the overlooked and proposing the equal status of urban myth and lived experience."

Rooney was the winner of Art Prize North in 2003, the Northern Art Prize in 2008, and the Morton Award for Lens Based Work in 2012.

Notable exhibitions

Electric Earth: Film and Video from Britain, a British Council exhibition which toured internationally from 2003, included early video work by Rooney. In 2004 he curated a UK touring exhibition dealing with the relationship between music and 'the everyday', an interest which emerged from his own art practice (notably the Rooney band project). Pass the Time of Day included works by Arab Strap, Mark Leckey, Rodney Graham, Susan Philipsz and Phil Collins amongst others. The following year Rooney's work was selected for the survey show British Art Show 6, which toured the UK in 2005–2006, and in 2009 his video work Lost High Street was included in Running Time: Artist Films in Scotland 1960 to Now at Dean Gallery, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Rooney has undertaken solo projects at venues such as Site Gallery, Sheffield (a two person show with Susan Philipsz, 2003); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (an outdoor sound performance work for two venues with two rock bands, 2003); and Matt's Gallery, London (a sound work with 16mm film co-commissioned by Radar, Loughborough, 2008). Rooney's solo show as part of the Liverpool Biennial official programme in 2012, Here Comes Franz, included the video work The Futurist, which had recently been purchased by the University of Liverpool's Victoria Gallery and Museum with funds from the Contemporary Art Society. The work was originally commissioned for the exhibition Fifth Floor–Ideas Taking Space at Tate Liverpool in 2008.

Music

CD music albums (as art-works) by Paul Rooney, under the band name Rooney (not the US band of the same name), were broadcast from 1998 to 2000 by BBC Radio 1 (John Peel Show) and BBC Radio 3 (Mixing It) amongst others, and the track Went to Town reached number 44 in John Peel's Festive Fifty of 1998. As well as a solo recording project, Rooney became a performing band in time to record a Peel session in 1999, but the project ended after a third album was released in 2000. Paul Rooney returned to releasing records in 2007 with the red vinyl 12" Lucy Over Lancashire, a 16-minute dub anti-hymn to North West England, this time as 'Paul Rooney' rather than Rooney. It was specifically made for broadcast on BBC Radio Lancashire, but BBC Radio 1 and BBC 6 Music were amongst the other stations who broadcast the piece, and it reached number 5 in that year's Festive Fifty (now organised by Dandelion Radio).

Writing

Texts (as art-works) by Rooney were published by Serpent's Tail in 2006, by Whitechapel Gallery in collaboration with MIT Press in 2009 and 2011, and in 2012 a short fiction collection, Dust and Other Stories, was published by Akerman Daly/Aye Aye Books.