Paul Rooney (artist)
| Paul Rooney | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 1967 Liverpool, England |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation | Artist |
| Awards | Northern Art Prize (2008) |
| Website | www |
Paul Rooney (born 1967 in Liverpool) is an English musician-artist who works with music and words, and sometimes with film and video.
Paul Rooney studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating with an MFA in 1991. In 1998 he shifted from painting to making music, initially with the band Rooney and their three experimental lo-fi punk pop albums about everyday life.
During the 2000s, Paul Rooney's art practice — now primarily music 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 art works often explored the difficulties inherent in the representation of 'place'. 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.
In 2017 Rooney returned to making albums with the release of Futile Exorcise.
The three CD music albums released from 1998 to 2000 under the band name Rooney (not the US band of the same name) were broadcast 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. All of the Rooney songs were centred around lyrics describing banal events, everyday objects or mundane jobs, with home-recorded lo-fi music exalting/disrupting these observations in various ways. As well as a solo recording project, Rooney became a live band in time to record a Peel session in 1999, but the project ended after a third album was released in 2000. Paul Rooney continued to perform or work with other musicians after this however, such as The NWRA House Band, touring a 'variety night' and a 'rock opera' amongst other performance projects. He returned to releasing records in 2007 with the red vinyl 12" Lucy Over Lancashire, on SueMi Records of Berlin, a dub anti-hymn to North West England. Released under his full name of 'Paul 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 (despite it being 16 minutes long), and it reached number 5 in that year's Festive Fifty (now organised by Dandelion Radio). The Rooney Peel session was repeated in 2016 on Gideon Coe's BBC 6 Music show, and in 2017 Rooney's first album for seventeen years, Futile Exorcise, was released on Owd Scrat Records on transparent vinyl – again billed as 'Paul Rooney'.
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