Paul Rooney is an artist based in Liverpool who studied at Edinburgh College of Art between 1989 and 1991. He makes sound works as installations or with objects or video, and releases records. All his works have writing as their common basis, and focus on the instabilities and deceptions of narrative, particularly in relation to representing place. He has shown work at Tate Britain, The Arnolfini, and Whitechapel Gallery, and has exhibited at international museums such as Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City), CAAC (Seville), and Reina Sofía (Madrid). Two of his installations were purchased for the UK Arts Council Collection in 2015, and his work showing at the RSA, Broken Token, was an Imperial War Museum 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund commission.
The first opportunity I received related to the RSA was the John Kinross Florence Scholarship in 1991, which initiated a love of Italy and Italian culture that has lasted a lifetime. Opportunities like this, early in my career, were incredibly important for me in providing a foundation of confidence and a widening of my cultural horizons on which I was able to later build a career as a professional artist.
I received the RSA Morton Award for Lens-Based Media twenty years later, in 2011. The award resulted in a sound and video installation, The Kendall Iconoclasm, which was shown at the RSA Annual Exhibition in 2012. The basis of the work became a self-referential narrative about an artist travelling up the motorway towards Edinburgh to unveil an art installation that would thwart the plans of an evil genius! I have included a remix of the soundtrack of the work on a new vinyl album I will launch around the same time as This 26. Unlike many commissions I have undertaken before and since, the Morton Award gave me total artistic freedom, without proscribing themes or processes. It is vitally important that the RSA is able to continue providing opportunities like these for future generations of artists.
