Roy Claire Potter. Death to all pigs who enter here!

A plus A invites you to Death to all pigs who enter here! an exhibition of new drawings by Roy Claire Potter. Ten of the works on show are large-scale ink drawings on plastic and biodegra- dable polythene sheets, and over a hundred smaller works are presented on paper. The artist’s figurative and abstract drawings show bright floral shapes, animals and people. The plastics hold vivid bleeds of colour that are full of fluid movement and cover the ground, or rise up into ad-hoc shelters and tunnels, or are suspended from the ceiling like canopies or false ceilings that obstruct the view and movement through the gallery.
This first solo exhibition of Roy Claire Potter’s in Italy marks a major development in the ar- tist’s practice. Depictions of violent events or troubled living, and the use of central characters or narrative voices are all familiar to Potter’s image-heavy writing and audio works. This new installation work grows these scenes into more theatrical settings that take over the entire space of the gallery and suggest actions that have either taken place already, or might continue once visitors are out of sight. The artist builds a fictional world that occupies the exhibition spaces but everything is a little bit too small or too low to comfortably inhabit, or even access. Tunnels of drawings pass through every room, up the stairs and over the balcony, suggesting a passageway for something or someone other than the gallery’s visitors. The tunnels widen into larger sections that look like chambers and are illuminated from the inside but can’t be seen into.
A large number of small-scale, multicoloured ink drawings are made on high-gloss photographic paper and like the polythene works, show vibrant images of flora and fauna, animals hooves, angry or smiling pigs and bearded figures in colourful gowns that look like lost shepherds or sad guests at a masquerade. These smaller works are like a deck of cards or a family’s photo col- lection. They present a naive taxonomy and share scenographic details of a place beyond the installation, seen or invented by whatever or whoever inhabits the gallery’s rooms.
Death to all pigs who enter here! fuses archival research on the moorland history of West Yor- kshire read in medieval court rolls with the artist’s cinematic and literary influences such as cult British film, Threads (1984, dir. Mick Jackson) about everyday life during nuclear fallout, and The Butcher Boy (1992) a novel by Irish writer Pat McCabe whose unfortunate protagonist young Francie Brady cultivates a violent and hilarious fantasy life to cope with social exclu- sion—a key reference throughout the artist’s practice, acknowledged by the exhibition’s title.
Roy Claire Potter has recently presented solo and collaborative work with MOSTYN Gallery, Llandudno, Wales (2021); Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2021); art radio station, Radiophre- nia in Glasgow (2020); BBC Radio 3 (2020); Salzburger Kunstverein (2020); Collecteurs, New York (2020); and Tate Britain (2019). They have published two books of experimental art wri- ting, Round That Way (Ma Bibliotheque, 2017) and Mental Furniture (VerySmallKitchen 2014) and shorter works are published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Hotel Partisan, Tate Publishing, and Centre For Contemporary Art Derry-Londonderry. Roy has released audio with Cafe OTO, London (2020), Sub Rosa, Belgium (2018), Chocolate Monk; Brighton (2018), and Fort Evil Fruit, Dublin (2014/15).
In 2022 they will present new work with Primary arts centre in Nottingham, and new collabo- rative work with South Korean musician Park Jiha for Counterflows music festival in Glasgow and Cafe OTO’s Otoroku record label, London.

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