Paul Rooney: Still at Large

Berwick Visual Arts and Berwick Film & Media Art Festival artist in residence Paul Rooney presents a new work in response to the festival theme ‘Fact or Fiction’.

‘Still at Large’ is inspired by a post on an internet film-forum in which a forum member stated that his father, whilst on a holiday on Holy Island in 1965, witnessed the filming of Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac on the island. The post goes on to reveal that he shot home movie footage of the climactic night-time scene where a white Jaguar car is blown up at the foot of Lindisfarne Castle. Whether the claim is true or not, Rooney has used this dreamlike encounter with the landscape, and it’s real and fictional past, as the focal point for this new work.

Paul Rooney creates sound, video and text works that focus on the instabilities and deceptions of language and narrative, particularly in relation to how they represent ‘place’ and the historical memory that haunts it.

Paul studied at Edinburgh College of Art. From 1998 to 2000 he released three music albums as the band ‘Rooney’, featuring in John Peel’s Festive Fifty as well as recording a session for the show. Since then he has continued to make sounds, videos and texts with recent solo exhibitions at the Liverpool Biennial, Outpost Norwich and screenings at the ICA and Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Berwick Visual Arts and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s joint 2015 residency provides the opportunity for an artist working with moving image to focus intensively on a project for six months while responding to the 2015 festival theme of ‘Fact or Fiction’. View the full festival programme here