Paul Chaney’s work thematises and disrupts the framing of ‘Nature’ in several ways, some subtle, some more confrontational. His work is above all concerned with an effort to coexist with other living beings; but the seriousness with which he takes this problem is matched by a keen awareness that it is never solved, but only deepens as it is pursued.
To become close to nature, for Chaney, is at the very least to repudiate the notion that the natural world is something unreservedly worthy of our admiration, something from which we can draw some comforting meaning.

Chaney is a professed monist – for him, the strong hypothesis that ‘all matter is from one source’ implies a rescinding of any special privilege granted to the human. But his monism inherits an ironic edge from his interest in ‘cognitive dissonance’ – our ability to maintain, against all the evidence, our conceit that humans are the unmoving centre of the universe.

Chaney’s work admits there is no acceptable ‘solution’ to the problems he poses. His irony, however, is not the cynical resignation of the city-dweller. For at the cutting edge of his practice, he battles with unaestheticised nature as few of us do. His central, ongoing work FIELDCLUB (2004-present) consists in his own attempt to live ‘off-grid’ in a remote field in the southwest of the UK. He grows his own food, disconnected from public utilities and drawing as little on outside resources as possible. Much of his recent work continues to document incidents in the day-to-day course of this experiment in living, small occurrences which never fail to blacken the name of Eden.

Admitting that the logos of ‘ecology’ is always already recoded, messed up, and unnatural, Chaney enhances it with a dark ecology of uncomfortable co-existence and intervention. A bracing antidote to all that is sentimental, deluded and terminally bourgeois in discourses of the rural and ‘environmental’, Chaney proposes more profound and twisted philosophical roots for them, plunging the viewer into strange situations, emotions and perceptions that expose the urgency and complexity, not to mention the humour and the irony, of the problem at hand.

Robin Mackay, Falmouth, 2008