Artist profile - Paul Rooney

By Colin Serjent

Multi-talented Liverpool artist Paul Rooney, who won the prestigious Art Prize North last year, has followed a very diverse path in his career, working in various genres including painting, music (he has his own band called Rooney), performance, sound, text, and film & video.
"I find it exhilarating to move from one form of art to another," he said.

Up to 1998 he concentrated almost entirely on figurative painting using oils and acrylic, which led to him exhibiting his work in Tokyo and Edinburgh, among other locations, and also several residencies, notably his Abbey Award in Painting residency at the British School of Art in Rome, but then became more involved in conceptual and sound and text based works.

"Following the residency in Rome I needed a different form of approach in expressing my art," Paul added.

This led to him winning an Artists Research and Development Fellowship at the University of Dundee VCR and Dundee Contemporary Arts during 2001-2, followed by a MOMART Fellowship residency at Tate Liverpool in 2002-3.
Perhaps more interestingly he then travelled to Havana, Cuba, to run an artist residency at the end of last year.
"The main work I did was a video of interior and exterior shots of The National Arts Schools," stated Paul, "an incomplete and badly maintained architectural jewel emerging out, and now nearly overgrown, by the Cubanacan jungle."

During the time he was there he was informed from England that he had won the Art Prize North, worth £10,000, sponsored by the Comme Ca Gallery, based in Manchester.
The video installation, titled 'Flat 23', was a collaboration with Doreen Hughes, the former resident of flat 23 in a Liverpool tower block about to be demolished.

"I made a sound piece that lists the furniture that used to fill the flat." he said. "Each monitor's soundtrack musically describes the room's former objects, accompanied by a static image of the empty room."