PAUL CHANEY

Artistic statement:

 

My work sits at the intersection of fieldwork, durational embedding and speculative experimentation. I deploy diagrammatisation as Gesamtkunstwerk. Metrics, computation and performative data-collection become storytelling devices to narrate the precarity of human thought under the conditions of late-capitalism and ecological collapse.

 

I stand with the geophilosophers and speculative realists: reality is not a mirror of human intention. My diagrammatisations seek to redraw the assembly of agents, granting geology and solar radiation powerful seats at the table of human futures alongside technics, greed and sociopolitical trends. The field vole that dies under my scythe blade, the coal that stratified 360 million years before human civilisation existed are co‑authors of every harvest, every war. 

 

If thought emerges from a reciprocal Deleuzo‑Guattarian circuit between territory and Earth, then thought is destined to crumble—unless we break reality loose from the correlations that bind it to human perception, language and power. Objects, processes and events have an independence and anonymity that exceeds us. The Earth is not ours, we are merely its product.

 

Therefore my work seeks to extend the great humiliations of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. I wish to force the absolute contingency of Quentin Meillassoux into, and beyond, the ecological thought of Timothy Morton. As we stare into our finitude, we need to consider if our enlightenment was just a cruel trick of the Sun—just another small step in its desire to see everything burn. And if so, how and when do we finally realize our agency?