Paul Chaney

Paul Chaney’s work thematises and disrupts the traditional 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. 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 comforting meaning. Battles with un-aestheticised nature are central to Chaney’s practice. His ongoing work F I E L D C L U B (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. 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

Crap Corn, in situ at F I E L D C L U B

Chaney’s practice derives from his personal observations of nature and land use. His work Crap Corn has immortalised the transient event of last year’s crop failure due to a wet summer. Casts of twenty-five withered ears of corn, which had failed to pollinate, have been positioned as specimens on plinths. The radiant enamel paint on the corn entices the viewer, who can only be repulsed by the pathetic product. Chaney gently satires the idealistic trend for the utopian ideal of self-sufficient living, hinting at society’s dependency on globalisation and the mass market for its survival.

- Ruth Gooding

Recent Exhibitions
2009 The New Landscape, Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro
2008 The Lonely Now (solo), Goldfish, Penzance
2008 Nature Morte, Urbanomic, Falmouth
2008 Psycho-geographies, Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn

Paul Chaney's website
F I E L D C LU B

Robin Mackay is a philosopher and the editor of Collapse Journal, published by Urbanomic

Sarah Bunker

There is no doubt that our world is teetering on the brink of monumental change, brought about by climate change, environmental degradation and peak oil. We as individuals, and collectively, do not seem willing to take the drastic steps needed to avoid collapse.

‘From the earliest times, human civilisation has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.’

- W.G. Sebald

The idea of an empty world, in which nature re-colonises the legacy of human civilisation, is a strange thread which runs through my work, and has its roots in my childhood exploration of derelict buildings and wastelands. Such adventures aroused biophilia in me, in odd juxtaposition with uprooted tarmac and broken glass. By creating narratives lodged in such worlds, I want to create an atmosphere in which we feel loss for those things around us which are not yet gone: a type of pre-emptive nostalgia.

- Sarah Bunker

Landfall

Suggesting the presence of some unknown life form, Sarah Bunker’s Landfall series creates a sense of mystery, which is both magically intriguing and full of potential threat. Installed as a temporary installation taking place on two separate evenings during the run of the exhibition, visitors are invited to make their way from the gallery to the shoreline nearby. Here they will witness a discreet installation illuminated by torchlight. Drawing on ideas of abandoned lands, ruined cities or alien, mutated life, Bunker’s work suggests narratives that subtly play on the viewer’s imagination.

- Rebecca Darch

Landfall 2 will take place at 9pm on the 24th of April, after wastelands private view.

Landfall 3 will take plave at 8.30pm on the 1st of May, following the Creative Skills Cornwall Visual Arts Forum Afterhours, which will take the form of a discussion between cultural geographer Caitlin DeSilvey and philosopher Robin MacKay.

Landfall

Recent Exhibitions
2008 Strange Luminescence, University College Falmouth
2008 Out of Bounds, The Exchange (Basement), Penzance

Sarah Bunker's website

Jane Bailey

‘To think of place as an intersection – a particular configuration of happenings – is to think of place in a constant sense of becoming through practice
and practical knowledge.’ - Tim Cresswell, Place
I make art as a way of investigating the world, particularly ‘places’ as they are produced by people’s comings and goings. I look for interconnections and separations: between people, and between people and the locations they inhabit.
Where do I end, and other people, things and places begin? This is one of the questions that fuels my work.
My working process is often collaborative and it involves activities such as talking, eating, walking, riding, rowing and recording. Inquisitive interactions of camera, person and place are used to cast a sideways glance at seemingly straightforward, ‘natural’, environments.

- Jane Bailey

Revert

Jane Bailey’s quietly enthralling video forces a consideration of how a familiar, natural environment might be seen and experienced in other more disjointed and confusing ways. Revert presents a lush, idyllic landscape setting. Slowly, an ungainly figure walks cautiously into the frame. It may take a while for the viewer to realise that this isn’t just a pleasant walk in the woods, but an awkward and apprehensive struggle with the place and its surroundings. Here nature, even in its most benign and picturesque state, becomes a difficult, uncertain terrain.

- Rebecca Darch

Recent Exhibitions
2008 Time, Tides and Teabags, B-Side festival.
2008 At Sea, Transition 8, Newlyn Art Gallery,
2008 Screen, Contemporary Art 2008, Atkinson Gallery
2007 Participation, The Poly, Falmouth.
2007 Person, place, interaction, Degree show, MA Contemporary Visual Arts, UCF.

Jane Bailey's website
MAstars article on Axis