Roy Claire Potter

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 as part of Arrhythmia, a series curated for Book Works by Katrina Palmer.

Roy Claire Potter works between performance and experimental art writing with recent work commissioned by Tate Britain and Tate Publishing, Reduced Listening for BBC Radio 3, Cafe OTO and Counterflows, and Primary. They are Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University.

Katrina Palmer is an artist and writer, living in London. She is the author of The Dark Object (2010), The Fabricators Tale (2014), End Matter (2015) and Black Slit (2023), all published by Book Works. She has exhibited extensively, including with an Artangel Open commission (2015), at Henry Moore Institute (2015-16), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2018), and with Estuary and Waterfronts (2021). She received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2014). 

Proposed by Chris Evans, Sudden Wealth is a collaboration with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Graham Kelly and invited poets and artists who use spoken word as their medium. 

Sudden Wealth looks to how the flux of subjectivity in language can be shaped, agitated and re-imagined through a triangulation between written composition, intonation, and extrinsic sound composition. The latter spans analogue and digital instrumentation, foley recordings and algorithmically derived musical patterns. Divergent methods of composition work on and into a voice, modelling intonation, and affecting its sense and intent. 

This first iteration has been made with Roy Claire Potter, an artist who tells stories from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. A rapid vocal delivery, a sense of restricted or partial views of space, complex social and group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are recurrent strands of Potter’s writing, which are often delivered with a dark and sometimes wilful humour. 

Chris Evans was the bassist with the now defunct Life Without Buildings and has previously produced musical compositions with Morten Norbye Halvorsen together with farmers and accountants for his ongoing series ‘Jingle’. Graham Kelly joins Evans and Halvorsen for this present series, Sudden Wealth.

Vocals: Roy Claire Potter.
Electronics: Morten Norbye Halvorsen.
Bass: Chris Evans.
Guitar: Graham Kelly.
Arranged and mixed by Morten Norbye Halvorsen.

Guest edited by artist Helen Marten and literary agent Harriet Moore with Matthew Stuart, this volume of the journal considers what it means for a publication to be an allegorical container. A simple box in which to gather multiple things, an economical set of permutations — rational in one sense, yet defiantly flexible to move. Contributors were approached with an open invitation; some explored the multiplicities of containing or containers, while others filled the printed vessel with their own ongoing preoccupations. The following pages perform as envelope, bag, shell, net, fold, alarm, letter and instruction. There are holes to disappear within; smoke to knot and wind; shadows to unfold — a context that takes in and binds, finding new kinships from unforeseen proximities.

THE FIRE FLOWERS AND THE FLOWER LIGHTS UP –
Lucy Mercer
(spine)

WE SHALL GREET THE MOON AGAIN
Walter Price
(front cover)

BACK PAGES OF ALGIERS DIARIES 2018
Lydia Ourahmane
(inside front & inside back cover)

AN INTRODUCTION TO / NOTES ON / INSTRUCTION FOR THE FRONT NOVEL
Eliza Barry Callahan
(pp.1–16)

SATURDAY MORNING
Kathryn Scanlan
(pp.25–29)

KILLDEER
Jason Schwartz
(pp.33–38)

ALARMS AND EXCURSIONS
Rosmarie Waldrop
(pp.45–61)

"THE BATHROOM"
Najwa Barakat
(pp.67–76)

ARMY ROLLS, A CIRCUMSCRIPTION
Roy Claire Potter
(pp.81–91)

CONCHOMANIA
Felix Bernstein
(pp.95–109)

O-POEM
Line-Gry Hørup
(pp.113–129)

THIS MUSCLE
Cally Spooner
(pp.133–153)

STERLING PARK IN THE DARK
Susan Howe
(pp.159–179)

COCONUTTERY
Mathelinda Nabugodi
(pp.183–193)

YOUR SELF CONFIDENT BABY
Aurelia Guo
(pp.197–206)

BIOGRAPHY OF A NET: HOLDING A VOLUME
Daisy Hildyard
(pp.211–225)

A GUIDE TO THE POETRY OF LI HO
Eliot Weinberger
(pp.229–235)

WOMEN SMOKING
Charline von Heyl
(throughout & p.239)

INFRATHIN
Marcel Duchamp
(throughout & p.239)

THE MAZED WORLD
Rachael Allen
(bookmark insert)

UNTITLED
Helen Marten
(back cover)

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

With contributions from: 

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

Care is a matter of responsibility for human and nonhuman allies, an ecological network. Care is an imperative, and acting with care approaches the world beyond selfhood. ON CARE, an aggregate of voices, discusses the politics of caring, support, and the role of welfare in an increasingly neoliberal society. It questions who is seen as worthy of care, whose narratives are given attention, and whose lives are overlooked in a complex web of assemblages: conceptions of medical authority, the co-option of self-care in political rhetoric, care as a commodity in the hospitality industry, intergenerational intimacy, sexecology; care as utopian and care as transactional. ON CARE maps a constellation of perspectives, as testaments, fictions, and essays, addressing the relation between good health, interdependence, and the ethics of (self)care. 

Contributors: Tom Allen, Uma Breakdown, Alice Butler, Oisín Byrne, Julia Calver, Jamie Crewe, Juliette Desorgues, Rachel Genn, Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Laura González, Holly Graham, Helen Hester, Justin Hogg, Juliet Jacques, Mati Jhurry & Rebecca Jagoe,  Juliet Johnson, Sophie Jung, Daisy Lafarge, Elisabeth Lebovici, Rebecca Lennon, Rona Lorimer, Katharina Ludwig, Mira Mattar, Martina Mullaney, Cinzia Mutigli, Carolina Ongaro, Molly Palmer, Roy Claire Potter, Nat Raha, Helena Reckitt, Ruiz Stephinson, Erica Scourti, Victoria Sin, Himali Singh Soin & Tyler Rai, Miguel Soto Karlovic,  Isabella Streffen, Jamie Sutcliffe, Maija Timonen, Lynn Turner, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Daniella Valz Gen, Nina Wakeford, Alberta Whittle