“As a model, I am an artist.”
As a model, writer and filmmaker, storytelling is central to Roy Joseph Butler’s practice, one now shifting towards a critical exploration of his life journey and a heritage - personal and social - informing both his identity and his outlook as a body-positive Queer person. Consequently, he is compelled to introduce and engage ever-newer audiences with the life room, a place of compulsory collaboration between fine artist and life model and a formative creative centre in which his body and the history traced upon it are displayed, ready for critical artistic interpretation. In this space, he perpetually rediscovers himself.
Roy’s work is mainly concerned with expressions of belonging. From the Life Room, his debut exhibition, is a documentation in photographs of those spaces where he, as artists’ model, has been both inspiration and subject, encouraging viewers to consider how they see, how the subject who would otherwise inhabit the space may view them and how that, in turn, translates into a conversation of creative collaboration and acceptance. In that conversation, the creatives on both sides of the easel function as artists and necessary agents, and in the tacit dialogue between them, they find manners of expression and, it is hoped, real senses of place.
Roy is the founder of charity and social enterprise Packed Lunch Productions, whose mission is to advance visual storytelling through fine art, moving image and performance, subsequently improving the social capital of its partners and participants alike. All proceeds from From the Life Room will go to supporting the organisation’s public programming.
A free exhibition.
