Public Knowledge: Arrhythmia with Katrina Palmer, Roy Claire Potter and Alice Walter - Camden Art Centre

An evening of readings, performance and audiovisual work to launch 'Arrhythmia', a Book Works open submission series edited by Katrina Palmer.

Katrina will be joined by Roy Claire Potter and Alice Walter, reading from their new novels, The Wastes and The Medium.

About Arrhythmia:
Guest-edited by artist Katrina Palmer, Arrhythmia is a new series publishing artists and writers whose work explores ideas of being out of joint with the predominant social order, whether through disrupted trajectories, physical displacement, or political dissonance. We asked for experimental work that articulates a discontinuous sense of identity, and writing, or where the combination of writing and images in which the rhythm of the text is self-consciously questioned. Four authors have been commissioned – novels by Roy Claire Potter and Alice Walter are out now and will be followed by two new titles by Andrew E. Colarusso and Kamwangi Njue in 2025.

About The Medium:
To read The Medium is to be submerged in a stream of consciousness populated by uninvited voices from the underworld. Animated, urgent, and brutally propulsive, this cacophony of competing narratives begins to upset the boundary between the living and the dead. The Medium is an alchemical novel, shimmering with insight from the depths of a black lake.

About The Wastes:
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 Speakers

The Speakers

Katrina Palmer is an artist and writer, living in London. Palmer works with storytelling, distributing fragmented elements of narrative across found sites, audio environments, printed matter and performance. The site of writing and the process of attempting to materialise, edit and reformulate ideas is often articulated through the work. Attentive to uncertainties, bodily vulnerabilities and insecure environments, these situated narratives invite the audience to consider objects that are indicated, but not fully present.

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.

Alice Walter is an artist, writer and medium – living and working in the UK. She has a BA in Fine Art, Film and Video from Central Saint Martins, UAL and a MFA from The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. Her practice combines collage, psychosexual sculpture, VHS and shamanism. Through these disciplines, Alice creates surreal and sensory spaces that open channels for the unseen.