Sunday 30 June 2024, 2pm
This event is rescheduled from Sunday 2nd June. All tickets booked for the original event remain valid for the new date.
A celebration of Roy Claire Potter’s long-awaited debut novel The Wastes with guests including artist and writer Daniella Valz Gen, and sound artist Kieron Piercy.
The launch event will begin with a new reading performance by Roy Claire Potter and Kieron Piercy, whose previous collaborative releases and broadcasts include Conversations with the Anthony Burgess Archive on Sub Rosa, and Three Sweep Between for Glasgow’s art radio station Radiophrenia. This will be followed by a conversation about the themes and production of the novel in the context of artists who write with Daniella Valz Gen, who is the 2024 Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery.
After the death of her mother a woman decides to visit a familiar strip of rural upland, darkly identified on the South Pennines Ordnance Survey map as: The Waste. As she moves between trains, shunted by public encounters and haunted by past bar jobs, damp bedsits and a press shot of Vanessa Redgrave smoking in the bath, found slipped between the pages of her mother’s diary, the threshold between her past, present and future self dissolves. Fringe images she has neither designed nor authored begin to steer her toward grid reference 3499, where underfoot the semi-solid mud turns with worms and ants.
The Wastes is published by Book Works as part of Arrhythmia, a series curated by Katrina Palmer. https://bookworks.org.uk/publishing/shop/the-wastes/
Roy Claire Potter has released duo and solo audio works with labels like Cafe OTO’s Otoroku and Takuroku, Sub Rosa, Chocolate Monk, and Fort Evil Fruit, and has worked with a broad range of musicians and sound artists including Park Jiha, Ziúr, Kieron Piercy and Bridget Hayden. With a visual art background in experimental art writing and drawing, Roy tells stories built from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings, often focusing on group dynamics or the aftermath of violent events with a dark, sometimes wilful humour. They publish writing and make exhibitions internationally, and recent collaborations for stage and broadcast have been made possible by BEK, Counterflows, Reduced Listening for BBC Radio 3, and Wysing Art Centre’s Polyphonic music festival with Somerset House.
Based in Leeds, Kieron Piercy produces amateur acousmatics for computer and electronics with releases on Harbinger Sound, Porta, and Chocolate Monk.
Daniella Valz Gen is an artist and writer born in Lima and based in London, who works across installation, text, and live performance. Their work investigates different forms of embodying liminality, and reflects on the negotiation of territories, modes of address, and value systems. They are the 2024 Whitechapel Gallery Writer in Residence and their first collection of poetry Subversive Economies is published by PSS.
