Roy Claire Potter: COMMS FAIL

27 June – 1 August 

Phones eventually died. We heard their final signals transmit in the dark.

Artist writer and performer, Roy Claire Potter opens their first institutional solo exhibition at Chapter with COMMS FAIL, a new narrative artwork about the dystopic prospect of communications failure.

Unfolding across exhibition, performances, broadcast, print and audio publications throughout 2026, and developed with a team of fellow autistic artists, radio astronomers, amateur radio operators, musicians and creative consultants, COMMS FAIL explores the grammar of communicative resilience and remote connection by amplifying autistic perspectives.

COMMS FAIL speculatively mixes up research on Coronal Mass Ejections, or large disruptive energy bursts from the sun, with popular paranoia about electromagnetic pulse bombs, a kind of nuclear weapon developed to wipe out satellite systems, frazzling electronics and power grids in the process. Into this mix, Roy explores the popular image of the shortwave radio in dystopic fantasies that show us how contingent community is on good ‘comms’. In Roy’s narrative, it is the sun that has caused such catastrophe and, in the process, has electromagnetised bodies and their environments, causing them to issue and receive signals and make a different kind of communication possible.

The exhibition presents a sculptural listening environment where large-scale ink and adhesive tape drawings made in response to the astrodynamics of solar flares, float on translucent biodegradable polythene and form tent-like structures informed by prepper culture. Under these, you will hear reworked elements of emergency radio broadcasts and arrangements from composer Carmel Smickersgill’s original music for the project, along with live radio static and, potentially, live radio broadcasts from the international amateur radio community.

COMMS FAIL is developed through creative workshops with Jamie Gawronski, Elodie Horsewell, Andrew Li, Rima Salem, Anya Taylor and is has been supported through consultancy from audio producer Kit Callin, Erik Chancy (LB1KJ) of Norsk Radio Relæ Liga, Philippe Zarka the CNRS Research Director at Paris Observatory, and by the work of Professor Philippa Browning at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester the result of an Unlimited UK Partner Award 2025 commission with Liverpool Biennial made possible thanks to funding from Arts Council England, with research and development generously supported by Art Explora, Paris.

COMMS FAIL premiered as a live stage performance for three voices at Bluecoat, Liverpool on 2nd May 2026, with a simultaneous radio broadcast on Resonance FM. Later this summer, a print publication containing the script and visual scores will be published under Cafe OTO’s new publishing imprint OTOHON. An album version of the work will be released on their digital label later in the year, with all proceeds to National Autistic Society, UK.

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Artist biography

Roy Claire Potter is an artist writer who performs. They have recently presented live and recorded works with: Bluecoat, Liverpool (2026); Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (2026), Channel at Somerset House (2025); Serpentine Park Nights (2025), Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (2024), PRIMARY (2022/3), Counterflows and Cafe OTO (2022), and BBC Radio 3 (2020). Solo and group exhibitions have been presented internationally at A plus A, Venice (2023; 2018); Artissima, Turin (2019); IMT Gallery, London (2019); OUTPUT, Liverpool (2019); and ChelseaSPACE, London (2018), among others. In 2024, their ‘gently experimental’ novel The Wastes was published by Book Works, guest edited by Katrina Palmer for ‘Arrhythmia’, a series of artist books that explore ideas of being out of joint with the predominant social order.