Megan Rooney
Seeing (you)
January 17—February 21, 2026
Seeing (you), 2025
Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas
199,5 x 150,2 cm
(78,5 x 59,1 in)
Untitled, 2025
Acrylic, oil, pastel on paper
Image 60 x 40 cm (23,62 x 15,74 in)
Framed 65 x 46,5 (25,59 x 18,30 x 1,57 in)
Untitled, 2025
Acrylic, oil, pastel on paper
Image 60 x 40 cm (23,62 x 15,74 in)
Framed 65 x 46,5 (25,59 x 18,30 x 1,57 in)
Untitled, 2025
Acrylic, oil, pastel on paper
Image 60 x 40 cm (23,62 x 15,74 in)
Framed 65 x 46,5 (25,59 x 18,30 x 1,57 in)
The navel—our first scar—points back to our origin, of being bound to kin. We enter the world so marked, a suture at our centre.
Our impulse to mark is older than this wound.
The marks on the walls become conduits—channels from another epoch, geological or psychic. They pull us through time like a vein.
This familiar urge to outlast. Is the refusal to be eclipsed what scars us?
Marks promise permanence. Scars signal loss.
The scar holds the absence it names.
2
Painting within the logic of loss:
Colour thickens. Density accumulates. And then it is erased.
Even in your paintings that endure, erasure builds as much as the layers themselves.
Taking away is what completes the work.
3
Your paintings, like weathervanes, hold ecosystems—echo the beat and damp, dewy climate from which they sprung, and so are we. We are fleshy bodies tuned to light, entrained to unseen rhythms.
Wingspan: you speak often in terms of flight, of restlessness as measure.
Dancing: innate math, an unconscious computation that draws on our tether to the divine.
I can’t count, but I can dance.
4
What does it mean to see?
Vision is electrical and bodily. It is also an act of recognition: to name, connect, and understand.
Colour itself is born from refusal. An object appears as what it does not absorb—everything but the wavelength we attach to it. Colour, then, is a mirror.
I find my dad in the grid—a math genius. He’s not alive now.
He taught me to count, while you (Megs) to see what counts.
This is why the grid holds.
Outro:
To live with no memory is to live with no wounds. This emptiness overwhelms. You joke about pounding past the three Henry Moores on your dash to the studio—“I’ve seen them all”—and then colourfully detail each one, undoing the joke in the telling.
I never know if I’ve seen something before. Aphantasia means what remains is not the image, but its charge.
Your limbs, paintbrush and power sander pull and coat what’s outside in: a dense fragrant web of all that was caught on your way to the studio—from the fox scuttling across the curb to all the Henry Moores.
Innate math lives here too: you pelt ten km across London to beat the outside in; you size the paintings to your wingspan. At your mural walls, one hand steers the cherry picker while the other hand wields the paint—rising, falling, extending the body through machinic reach.
On this surface, I meet you, and see myself.
“Then suddenly it’s like oh yeah. There you are. But you couldn’t have predicted how it was going to be and you can’t start off trying to get to the end.”