FEB 23 - Dead Ink Book Club - THE WASTES by Roy Claire Potter

February's pick for the Dead Ink Book Club is THE WASTES by Roy Claire Potter, which we held a launch event for last year. The Wastes is published as part of Arrhythmia, a series curated for Book Works by Katrina Palmer.

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. 

Semi-autobiographical, gently experimental and painfully real, this exploration of Northern landscapes and identity provides plenty of talking points!

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.

The Dead Ink Book Club is run by Alyssa Lloyd & Lauren Archer.