Paul Rooney (born 1967 in Liverpool) is an English artist who works with music and words, primarily through installations and records.[1]
He studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art.[2] In the late 1990s his art practice shifted from painting to video and music, initially with the artist group Common Culture and then the band Rooney.[3][4] His work later focussed on sound and music within video works, installations and performances.[5][6][1]
His art works often explore the difficulties inherent in the representation of place, mixing unreliable narratives of personal experience and urban myth.[7][4]
The three CD music albums released from 1998 to 2000 under the band name Rooney (not the later US band of the same name)[4][3] were broadcast by BBC Radio 1 (John Peel Show) amongst others,[14] and the track Went to Town reached number 44 in John Peel's Festive Fifty of 1998.[15][16]Rooney became a live band in time to record a Peel session in 1999.
Electric Earth: Film and Video from Britain, a British Council exhibition which toured internationally from 2003, included early music/video work by Rooney.[25] In 2004 he curated Pass the Time of Day, a UK touring exhibition dealing with the relationship between music and 'the everyday'. Pass the Time of Day included works by Arab Strap, Rodney Graham and Susan Philipsz amongst others.[26][27][16] The following year Rooney's work was selected for the survey show British Art Show 6,[28] which toured the UK in 2005–2006. Rooney had solo shows at venues such as Site Gallery, Sheffield (a two-person show with Susan Philipsz, 2003);[29] and Matt's Gallery, London (2008).[30][31]
In 2012 Rooney had a solo show in the Liverpool Biennial official programme,[37] and also that year Dust and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction published by Akerman Daly/Aye-Aye Books, was published.[38] The RooneyPeel session was repeated in 2016 on Gideon Coe's BBC 6 Music show,[39] and in 2017 Rooney's first album for seventeen years, Futile Exorcise, was released on Owd Scrat Records on transparent vinyl.[40] The album was on Stewart Lee's list of best records of 2017[41] and a track from it, Lost High Street, reached number 1 on the 2017 Festive Fifty (now compiled by Dandelion Radio).[42] Along with further record releases[43][44] he also began to create sited sound installations in historic locations such as Ripon Courthouse (2019)[45] and Lindisfarne Castle (2022-2023).[46][47]
