One way Trip

The Unconscious Therapy, 2021, Oil and Acrylic on Ply, 183cm x 183, Painting

The Unconscious Therapy

The Unconscious Therapy grew from LUAP’s recognition that some of the experiences that alter our psychological state happen almost without us noticing. Time spent in nature, watching a fire, moving through water or encountering a particular light can create moments in which thought shifts and the noise of the mind briefly changes.

Nature within the work is not presented simply as an escape. LUAP describes the mind as something closer to a wild jungle, capable of feeling overwhelming and disorientating while also containing the conditions for growth. Rather than trying to remove that complexity, the series considers what can happen when our relationship to it changes. Forests, mountains, flowers, water and reflections become spaces through which fear, memory, beauty and renewal can coexist.

That sense of contradiction runs throughout the work. Flowers carry both abundance and the knowledge that life is fragile and brief. Reflections fracture and reform what is seen. The Pink Bear moves through these environments as a figure caught between vulnerability and discovery, allowing psychological experience to become visible without resolving it into a single emotional state.

The project has also moved beyond the image into physical space, most radically through an immersive room wrapped in more than 150 metres of pink fur. Across these different forms, The Unconscious Therapy brings exterior landscape and interior experience into contact, asking how the environments we move through can quietly alter the landscapes we carry within us.