Pass The Ketchup

Feels Like Home, 2025, Watercolour on Paper, 76cm x 56cm, Watercolour

Feels Like Home

Feels Like Home returns to the places, rituals and ordinary experiences through which a sense of belonging is formed. Drawing on LUAP’s working-class upbringing and personal history, the works consider how memory settles into environments, objects and repeated gestures, allowing seemingly everyday moments to acquire emotional weight over time.

The Pink Bear appears within these familiar settings as both participant and observer. Its presence shifts what might otherwise feel recognisable, introducing a slight distance through which humour, vulnerability and nostalgia can coexist. Home becomes less a fixed location than something accumulated through relationships, routines and the memories attached to them.

Some works return directly to LUAP’s childhood in Grimsby and Cleethorpes. Golden Chips & The Three Bears, for example, centres on Steels fish and chip restaurant and the family rituals surrounding it. Yet the series moves beyond autobiography, using these particular memories to consider the wider ways food, repetition, seaside places, family and loss become bound up with our understanding of where, and with whom, we belong.