LUAP presents My Head Feels Clear When I Am Outside at Gallery No.32’s Winter Sculpture Park in Bexley. The 2.4 × 2.4 metre work is his first large-scale Pink Bear head and first outdoor Sculpture, extending the figure from image and object into the landscape.
Cut from ply and painted by hand, the Sculpture takes the familiar outline of The Pink Bear and strips it back to a single enlarged head. Bolts, Steel and Concrete give the work the structure needed to remain outside, while its deliberately direct construction keeps the focus on scale, colour and its relationship with the surrounding land.
That move outdoors changes the work significantly. Until this point, LUAP’s Sculpture has largely been encountered within controlled interior spaces. Here, the work is exposed to shifting daylight, frost, weather and the changing conditions of the landscape. Pink can appear intense in one moment and muted in another, while shadows move across the painted surface throughout the day. The Sculpture never presents itself in quite the same way twice.
The title connects this physical shift with a recurring concern in LUAP’s practice around nature and psychological experience. Being outside has long offered a way to create distance from internal noise, allowing thought to settle through space, movement and contact with the natural world. My Head Feels Clear When I Am Outside turns that feeling into a simple physical proposition, placing the head itself directly into an open landscape.
The change in scale is equally important. At 2.4 × 2.4 metres, the head is no longer simply a recognisable motif translated into Sculpture. It begins to occupy space on its own terms. Seen from across the field it reads almost like a marker, while at closer range its size alters the familiar relationship between viewer and Bear.
This is the first of LUAP’s larger Pink Bear head Sculptures, opening a new direction for the figure through scale, material and environment.
Winter Sculpture Park places work by more than 40 artists across four acres of disused farmland in Bexley, creating a temporary public exhibition outside the conventions of the gallery. For LUAP, that setting allows the Sculpture to become part of the landscape rather than simply being placed against it.
