Sun Spot

Lone Soldiers, 2012, Mixed Media on Birch Ply, 90cm x 90cm, Mixed Media

Lone Soldiers

Lone Soldiers began during a period of disconnection and loneliness, when LUAP found himself increasingly drawn to solitary trees and began to identify with their isolation. In Fence, the earliest work in the series, landscape already carries a sense of separation. As the work developed, trees became a way of giving form to psychological states that were difficult to articulate directly.

LUAP photographed them obsessively, building an archive from trees encountered while travelling, on everyday journeys and others deliberately sought out because of something in their form. Some stand alone, others are stripped bare, damaged or consumed by dense growth. Their physical condition begins to mirror shifting feelings of resilience, vulnerability, solitude and overwhelm.

These photographs became the foundations for Paintings in which landscape is interrupted by colour, Screen Print and decorative pattern. Among the recurring elements is wallpaper from LUAP’s childhood home, bringing fragments of domestic memory into contact with the natural world. The familiar and the external begin to overlap, allowing landscape to operate as both a real place and a psychological one.

Rather than fixing the tree to a single meaning, Lone Soldiers moves between different states. Strength can become vulnerability, solitude can suggest both endurance and isolation, and the surrounding landscape can offer shelter or become suffocating. LUAP’s identification with the trees is expressed most directly in a poem written alongside the work:

Some days I am the strong tree, nothing can move me.

I am invincible.

Some days I am the old tree that has shed all its leaves.

I am vulnerable.

Some days I am the lone tree stood in solitude.

I am surviving.

Some days I have been overgrown by all that surrounds me. Overwhelmed I suffocate.

Most days I am never the tree that I want to be.