Where Does Reality End and Make Believe Begin

Unrealistic Expectations, 2015, C-Type Print, 183cm x 124cm, Photography

Unrealistic Expectations

Unrealistic Expectations examines how the toys and characters encountered in childhood can quietly establish ideas about who we are expected to become. Dolls, action figures and idealised bodies introduce early models of beauty, behaviour, gender and identity, long before their influence is consciously understood.

LUAP carries that language of play into adulthood, placing human figures alongside The Pink Bear and allowing the distinction between person, character and object to become unstable. Figures appear posed, constructed and at times almost toy-like, drawing on the visual languages of fashion, advertising and popular culture. What first appears playful begins to reveal the pressure of measuring a real body or life against an invented ideal.

Across Photography, Painting and Performance, the series explores the distance between lived identity and the versions of ourselves we are encouraged to perform. The Pink Bear, itself drawn from childhood memory and made physically present in the adult world, occupies the same uncertain territory between innocence and expectation, reality and make-believe.