LUAP, Wapp Art and Niya Ruseva present Trees Are For Life, Not Just For Christmas, transforming a concrete space in Wapping into a temporary forest of discarded Christmas trees. As the trees dry and change, the Installation extends their presence beyond the brief celebration for which they were cut.
Only weeks earlier, each tree occupied a home as a carefully decorated object of celebration. By January, that value has abruptly shifted. Gathered together rather than removed from sight, the discarded trees become evidence of a familiar ritual moving into its aftermath.
The Pink Bear appears among them as the trees gradually lose colour and shed their needles. Nothing is preserved at an ideal moment. Their changing condition is allowed to remain visible, making time part of the Installation rather than simply its subject.
Smoke machines are used to create indoor clouds, adding another layer to the work’s temporary forest. The haze softens the hard edges of the concrete space and gives the Installation a shifting atmosphere, as though weather itself has been drawn indoors. That effect heightens the sense of displacement, with nature not simply represented but partially reconstructed inside an urban interior.
Trees and landscapes have long carried emotional and psychological weight within LUAP’s practice. Across works such as The Unconscious Therapy, nature becomes a space in which memory, internal experience and change can overlap. Here, that relationship shifts. Nature has been cultivated, brought into the home, given symbolic value and then discarded once its immediate purpose has passed.
That cycle connects with LUAP’s wider interest in transformation, decay and what remains. The trees have not stopped existing simply because Christmas is over. Their movement from living material to decoration and then waste exposes how quickly our relationship with an object can change, while the material itself continues through a much slower process.
Around eight to ten million Christmas trees are sold in the UK each year, turning an intimate domestic tradition into something repeated on an enormous scale. Within the Installation, that wider pattern is condensed into one temporary forest, allowing the environmental question to emerge through accumulation rather than instruction.
The concrete surroundings heighten the contrast. Something grown outdoors and temporarily brought into domestic interiors is relocated once again, this time into an industrial space where drying branches, fallen needles, indoor cloud and the vivid presence of The Pink Bear sit against hard architectural surfaces.
Once the Installation closes, the trees will be taken for responsible recycling rather than landfill, allowing their material life to continue beyond both Christmas and the exhibition.
Trees Are For Life, Not Just For Christmas is presented at Wapp Art in Wapping from 17 January to 11 February 2023.
