Horny Beast

Bed Time Stories, 2018, Oil & Acrylic on Screen Print, 184cm x 123cm, Painting

Bed Time Stories

Bed Time Stories considers the bedroom as a space where intimacy, imagination and vulnerability can coexist. In childhood it can be a sanctuary, a place of rest and fantasy. In adulthood, the same space becomes charged by sex, sleep and dreams, but also loneliness, unwanted thoughts, sleeplessness and, for some, the threat of sexual predators.

Hotel bedrooms form the psychological architecture of the series. Intimate yet anonymous, familiar in function but detached from home, they create a space in which fantasy and unease can occupy the same image. Drawing on the sexualised visual language of advertising, fashion and popular culture, LUAP’s Photography and Painting use the polished surface of desire to expose less comfortable questions of power, vulnerability and consumption.

The series turns on the distance between the fantasy presented to us and the realities that can remain concealed beneath it. Sexual power, human trafficking and the treatment of people as commodities sit alongside the fragility of self-image, manipulation and the pressure to perform an acceptable version of the self. The seductive image is never allowed to remain entirely secure.