The travails, triumphs, and disappointments of eco-life, viewed
through the prism of artistic research.
In 2004, distressed by the insanity of capitalist consumerism but
dissatisfied with mere utopian rhetoric, self-taught artist Paul Chaney
went "back to the land" for real. During the next eight years spent
creating FIELDCLUB, a self-sufficient four-acre off-grid settlement in
the UK, Chaney continually scrutinized the travails, triumphs, and
disappointments of eco-life through the prism of artistic research. What
emerges from this durational embedded practice is a vision characterized
by a delicate equipoise between irony and sincerity and shot through
with absurdism, in which speculative materialist philosophies are
reworked in close contact with the humiliating tribulations of "living
with nature." In a shifting experimental triangulation of the human, the
non-human, and the technological, themes such as geotrauma, dark
ecology, and accelerationism are stress-tested, reconfigured, and
supplemented with new concepts including the apocalyptic vernacular,
carboniferous insurgency, and the solar contemporary.
Richly illustrated with sketches, diagrams, notes, and photographic
documentation of his work, Earth Leakage Trip explores these concepts
and collects Chaney's raw self-reflections on his itinerary as an
artist-outsider and as a human being--that extravagantly enlightened
species that nonetheless remains physically enmeshed with others.
