Jay Potrykus
Jay Potrykus is a sculptor, born in Staffordshire in 1999, who lives and works in Peterborough.
He builds wall-mounted assemblages from salvaged and domestic material: mixed woods laid up as marquetry, pub stools used as frames, handmade chain mail, carpet samples, plaster board and found objects, alongside photographic prints. He was a recipient of the Henry Moore Artist Award in 2023, and held a residency at Gildengate House with OUTPOST Studios in Norwich, where he also had a solo show.
Artist Statement
Jay Potrykus is an artist working across assemblage and installation, exploring the ways care and violence are imagined, performed, and misrecognised. Through found and crafted materials, his work holds humour, vulnerability, and recovery in uneasy proximity.
His work is interested in the unstable relationship between human intervention and animal life, and in the difficulty of distinguishing acts of care from acts of harm. Personal experiences of dependency and recovery enter the work indirectly, becoming entangled with questions of control, responsibility, and repair. Compromised, incomplete, and sometimes absurd materials become active participants in these tensions, creating situations in which care, violence, humour, and vulnerability can shift and overlap.